Why would anyone want to send free sms text messages via a website? What's wrong with tap, tap, tapping out your message on your mobile phone (or cell phone), and simply pressing send when you've finished? Why would anyone need to go online, just to send a text message?

If you have these questions about sms text messaging, then this short article is for you.

So, why would anyone want to send free sms via a website? (Stop me, if I'm going too quick!)

Free SMS is, er, free.

It's fast: it's much quicker to type the messages using a keyboard than it is to tap away at a tiny keypad. Even with predictive texting (or predoctive tixting, as I like to call it!) typing a text on your cellphone takes too long.

You can also queue your messages and send them later.

You can send messages to mobile phone users wherever they live in the world.

You can fool your friends and send them an anonymous text message online. (Online sms messages can nearly always be traced, though, so I don't recommend that you send abusive messages - that, and it's not nice, is it!)

Again, free sms is free. Texting can often cost you 12p or 10p or 10c when you use your cell phone. And if you have a free texting plan, does it really cover unlimited texts to all parts of the world?

You can receive messages on your cellphone or on your computer, when you use a free sms text messaging service.

You can use more than one free sms service (especially if you live in UK or USA) and almost never run out of free sms credits.

Okay, what's wrong with sending free sms via a website? There has to be some downsides, surely. After all, you don't get anything for free these days. (My, you're a suspicious type!)

Well, not all free sms services are fast. Not all services let you receive messages on your cellphone (or your PC). And not all free text messaging sites work.

And some free sms services are not even free, they just claim to be. Sometimes people get charged for receiving a message, and sometimes people are charged for sending them, via sneaky subscription charges buried away in tiny terms and conditions.

However, most free sms sites that have been around a while "do what it says on the tin"; i.e. they offer fast, easy-to-type free sms texting. And as such these sites are some of the net's best-loved freebies.

And even the sms sites that charge you, like ipipi, allow you to send sms quickly to almost anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of sending texts from your mobile or cell phone.

So why use free sms text messaging sites?

Well, er, it's free.

It's quicker: think typing rather than fumbling with your cellphone keypad.

It's worldwide: think of all your friends who don't live in the same country as you.

Above all, think free sms is free.