Adding function to your site - remotely

"Interactive" is good, or so the Internet pundits tell us. Visitors to your site get a kick out of chatting, joining a discussion board, being a part of your little world on the Web. They want to talk to you, forward articles to friends - they want to be a part of it.

But not all Web hosting services offer pre-packaged interactivity and contracting for custom services can be prohibitively expensive. Lazy Webmasters get it for free.

E-cards: You may have visited sites that let you send electronic greeting cards to your friends. Services such as Kangaroo Cards www.kangaroocards.net put free greeting cards on your site, and even allow you to create your own custom cards that your visitors can send. I made a custom card that you can send to all of your friends. Custom cards are designed in a graphics program; I used PhotoShop.

Discussion Boards: I'm ambivalent about discussion boards, especially for lazy Webmasters. You must monitor them, or they will get out of control. Weird, often nasty, people can take over your board and post truly vile things. When I must use a discussion board I usually create one in MS FrontPage. This has the advantage of being ad-free and not requiring registration. In fact, it's the ONLY thing I use FrontPage for. However, there are several sites that offer free ready-made discussion boards. I have created one using EZBoard. You can register for their services at www.ezboard.com. Make sure that the board you choose uses threaded messages: one that groups messages and their replies together. Most do.

Chat Rooms: While discussion boards are asynchronous (people post messages that can be read at any time) chat happens in real time. They seem to work best when chats are scheduled and advertised in advance. The free chat rooms available from internet services use Java Script and integrate right into your web page. Look for chat rooms at www.parachat.com; www.quickchat.com or chatroomweb.com.

Tell-a-friend: When you ask people how they hear about their favorite Web sites, many will tell you that they were referred by a friend. Tell-a-Friend utilities streamline the referral process. Your visitors just fill out a short form and the Web site URL is forwarded. BraveNet offers a nice service at www.bravenet.com.

Powered by Bravenet

E-mail lists: If you are just e-mailing a few people you can do it efficiently through your regular e-mail program. When the list gets large - or when you are inviting the public to join your list - it makes sense to use list management software. It allows people to sign up automatically, doesn't tick off your ISP and generally makes the process run a lot smoother. Yahoo groups groups.yahoo.com hosts mailing lists (called groups; you get other features, such as an online calendar.) Topica www.topica.com is another popular list manager.

Guest Books: I've never seen the point of guest books but I suspect they could be useful for a tourist-oriented business, such as a B&B. You can get free guest books at sites such as www.theguestbook.com; www.guestpage.com; www.bravenet.com, and guest.onecenter.com/.

Hit counters: If you don't have other options, a web counter is a good way of keeping track of the number of visitors to your site. Most Web hosts offer more sophisticated tracking as part of the hosting package, and for a business site it is more professional to be circumspect about hits. A good free counter is a freelogs.com. It has dozens of number formats and the advertising link is discreet. Anpther is Fast Counter, available at www.bcentral.com/products/fc/default.asp.

Free Web Counter

Searching: Creating a custom search engine would be prohibitively expensive but there are free options.

• Search this site: AtomZ www.atomz.com offers a wonderful free search engine for sites that need fewer than 500 pages indexed. It's easy to set up, discreet and best of all, free. I have an example on the Lazy Webmaster page.
  
  

• Search the Web: Google www.google.com/searchcode.htmlis, in my opinion, the finest search engine on the Web, and you can put their search box on your Web site. You can elect to have it search the entire Web, or the entire Web plus your domain. I also have an example on the Lazy Webmaster page.

  WWW YOUR DOMAIN NAME

So what's the down side?

Many of the tools are customizable - you can often change the colors and even add your own graphics and text. Some are not. You may end up with a big ugly box that clashes with your site. Second, the service you choose may go out of business, start charging a fee, or go down for an hour, a day, a week. You forfeit control.

Third, in most cases the service will want something in return, usually a link, sometimes a big button. This sends people off your site onto theirs. Fourth, I worry a little about the integrity of my user's information. Utilities like chat rooms, message boards, e-mail lists and "tell-a-friend" forms collect e-mail addresses. What does the service do with these? You could be exposing your users to spam from the service. Read the privacy agreements carefully.

Finally, mailing lists have to be maintained. Chat rooms and discussions boards should be monitored. If the Webmaster is not an active participant, these features tend to disintegrate and can cause more ill will than good.