Community Interaction
March 6, 2000
If you want to build a community around your site, then
you could probably make good use of a guestbook, or a messageboard,
or opinion polls, or email accounts for your users.
While the effort of setting up and maintaining some of these
may be minimal, since they're "third party services",
you should expect to spend some time, e.g. participating in
message board discussions or studying your poll results!
Forms and Guestbooks
Guestbooks let visitors to your page leave comments and remarks.
It adds more content to any site, and its fun for you to read as well.
You can see from where and when people are looking at your page,
and also get valuable feedback.
Its one of the simplest ways to add interactivity to your site.
Note that many of the afore-mentioned 'Web Tools Providers' also
provide these.
A guestbook gives your homepage an interactive element and makes it
easier for you to discover your reader's opinions.
You can completely customize Dreambook to match your site.
You can pick from a variety of templates,
and (in advanced mode)
you can edit the html directly to make your own custom forms.
You decide what fields appear in your guestbook,
and how they are arranged.
You can even ask your visitors questions and create complex questionaires.
Available in different languages (currently English and German).
Add as many fields to your guestbook as you want.
Field types include text, multiline text and assessment questions.
Get statistical information about the assessment questions.
Receive an email whenever a user signs your guestbook.
Delete inappropriate entries.
Customize all colors, heading texts and background images.
Message Boards
Create a place on the Internet where you and your family, friends,
clients and co-workers can get together and meet!
An Assembly is your own personal place to post,
respond to and organize messages.
A public forum that is easy for anyone in the world to reach at
any time of the day.
Delphi Forums members can create their own online communities for free,
or take advantage of features like their own "My Forums" page,
which keeps track of the communities they participate in.
Members also get email notification when somebody replies to their messages,
and when there are new messages in Forums of interest.
Delphi Forums also offers Profiles,
where members can post an image and personal information to share with others.
Surveys and Polls
Be careful about surveys and voting!
You should regard them as 'for fun only' - the results likely will bear
little resemblance whatever to the opinions of "the general population".
Meaningful results are generally only possible by the application of
large-scale scientific surveys.
Some of the issues to keep in mind are:
people who come to your site might be unrepresentative
(selection effect);
the number of votes may be statistically insignificant;
some of your users might (deliberately or accidentally) vote more than
once.
You should be careful to ensure that the application displays the number
of people who have voted, and don't disable it.
Offer a variety of services, including polls, surveys, and forums.
Whether you want to Poll your users with a simple question, Survey
them with many, allow them to give you feedback with a guestbook,
or create on open forum for discussion, freepolls.com is your
source.
Mister Poll is an interactive Internet opinion poll forum.
Plus, you can make your own free polls.
Net Votes is the original free polling service designed to
enhance personal and commercial web sites through online
interactive voting. The service is free to personal sites.
Free Email
One feature that most large commercial sites have in common -
especially portals - is free email.
This feature was pioneered by services like RocketMail, Juno,
and Hotmail.
The basic idea is to provide your visitors with free email accounts
so that they'll return every day to log in and check their accounts.
All the big boys use this technique, including Yahoo!, Excite, and
ZDNet.
Now you can too...
Users can come to your site to establish a private email account with
your domain name in their address.
You reap the benefit of consistent,
repeat traffic as users return regularly to send and receive new mail.
It allows anyone with a live domain name to offer a free Web-based email
service using that name, giving the domain name free promotion with
every email sent.
There's no software for the user to download and all mail and
maintenance are provided by the BigMailBox service,
with no added inconvenience to the webmaster.
Free Email service co-branded with your site.
ZapZone, ZZN, operated by Commtouch, Provides FREE, instant and
branded web-based email services to websites.
Website Tools Providers
How To Build a Web Site with Free Stuff Table of Contents
Scripts - Java, Perl, CGI, etc.
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