Posted on: 07 December, 2001
Author: Richard Lowe
If you really want people to be ... to your web site time after time,you need to add ... This can be as simple or as ... asyou want. It does not matter whether you are a begin If you really want people to be attracted to your web site time after time,you need to add interactivity. This can be as simple or as complicated asyou want. It does not matter whether you are a beginner, an intermediatewebmaster or the most advanced web designer around, you can add interactiveelements to your web site.What is an interactive element? For the purposes of this section, I amdefining it as a way to cause the visitor to a web site to interact witheither other visitors or the webmaster. Examples include email forms, chatscripts and games. You can also add tools such as dictionary lookup boxes,weather reports and code generators.If you are a beginning webmaster, if you are creating a simple homepage orif you do not have access to server-side scripting (a method to cause theweb server to do tasks for you), then what you will need to do is findoutside services to host your interactive capabilities. These services canbe bought (usually for a minor fee) or will will be free and display ads.The advantages of free services are that they are free, relativelybullet-proof (usually) and generally straightforward to use. The majordisadvantage is that they must make money indirectly through the use ofadvertisements. Sometimes this is just a simple banner, and the moreobnoxious services remove your visitor totally from your website and plantthem on theirs. The other disadvantage is you tend to lose visitors by usingthese free services, as it is their goal to get them to click on anadvertisement, not to get people to stay on your site.All of these remotely hosted services (a service run off of a web serverthat is not the same as yours) have a major flaw in that they tend to slowdown your web pages. Even something as simple as displaying a button loadedfrom one of these services can increase the load time of your page byseconds or even minutes. You see, it depends on how loaded their server is -not how much data is on your page.So do keep in mind that by using outside services to perform these functions(especially the free ones), you are (a) increasing the chances that yourvisitors will go elsewhere, (b) slowing down your website, and (c) reducingyour customization capabilities.The ideal solution is to load your site on a host which allows server-sidescripting. These can include CGI (Perl, TCL, and languages such as VisualBasic and C++) and more involved solutions such as ASP, PHP and SSI. Thedifference between these is that CGI is the creation of an external programwhich is invoked by your web pages, while ASP, PHP and SSI involved addingthe scripts directly to your web pages. You can also use client-side optionssuch as Java applets, JavaScript and VBscript.Just because you want to use CGI does not mean that you need to learn how towrite your own scripts. There are plenty of scripts that have been writtenby others which work perfectly well. Many of these are very customizable andwork very, very well. Just be careful to get your scripts from a reputablesource. I usually start from cgi-resources, which has a very comprehensiveselection of all types of solutions. Note that many scripts are free forprivate use ... sometimes free scripts may impose a fee for commercial use.So in conclusion, you can add interactive features to your web site usingoutside, remotely hosted services or you can host the scripts yourself. Youalso have the choice of writing your own scripts or obtaining them from ascript library. In any event, all of these features will give your visitorsa way to interact, thus increasing the chances that they will recommend yoursite and return themselves. Article Tags: Interactive Features Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com