New Web Business Guide Chapter 7 – Website Addons

The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here.

We have mostly discussed the basics, getting a domain name, choosing a hosting company, and getting your website built. If you are just going to have a static website, then you may not need this chapter, but there are some benefits to the different things you can add to your website.

Here is a short list of website addons and the benefit you might get from them;

1. Guestbook. This is one of the oldest website addons and most people do not use them anymore. It is where visitors to your website can sign your guestbook and leave a link back to their website. (Not recommended by us at all. Constant management required and spammers love guestbooks.)

2. Article Dashboard Directory A lot of people will tell you that unless you are in the article marketing or article directory business that you don’t need an article directory.

However, I have a website that got crawled by google 100,000 times last month because I have one. It also increases my search engine saturation, (number of pages indexed by the search engines), daily. Right now that website is a 30,000 page website.

An article directory is good for SEO. It takes a little time to manage because you have to approve articles and put them into the right categories. Article dashboard is the best software to install. It’s easy to manage and free.

3. A Company Blog Installing a company blog like www.yourcompanyname.com/blog and posting to it daily allows you to easily add fresh daily content to your website.

It can also bring in new traffic for your website. A lot of people are less intimidated by your blog than your website. You can publish your press releases, announcements, and special offers as well. WordPress is the best software to install if you plan to add a blog to your website.

Professional Management for Business Blogs

4. A Forum or Message Board Owning a forum sounds a lot easier than it is. The best software for a forum is either PHPbb or vBulletin in my opinion.

But keep in mind that “Build it and they will come” is from a baseball movie and does not apply to websites, blogs and forums. You have to advertise your forum. You have to keep the spammers out of your forum. You have to add content to your forum daily so people will have something to read and comment on. You have to respond to people posting in your forum.

Forum management is almost a full time job from the very beginning, so if you are planning to install a forum, make sure you are ready to devote time to it or hire a professional forum manager to help you.

5. Hit Counters & Stats Counters Another old tool to ignore. People do not believe you when you tell them a million visitors have been to your website today no matter what your little hit counter says. If you need to track stats, use google analytics or web trends.

6. Speaking Characters Use these to really annoy everyone who visits your website. I’m kidding . . . well a little. There are proper uses for certain websites for installing talking characters. However, if the reason you are thinking of installing a talking character is because you think it’s “really cool”, then don’t do it.

If the character has an actual purpose of explaining something that is not immediately obvious without the talking character, like this month’s special, then they can be useful.

8. Classifieds Ads Section Again, this is an item that has been around for ages. There are scripts that are easy to install that will help you offer a classified ad section to your website.

However, remember, you are responsible for every website you link to. Linking to bad websites will hurt you from an seo point of view. Allowing everyone to place a classified ad and a link to their website is inviting spammers, scammers, pornsters, and others to get links from your site to their site. If you are going to spend the time to approve every ad, then it can still be a useful tool.

9. Traffic Exchange Scripts Reciprocal links are dead. Don’t even consider a traffic exchange script or a webring.

10. Search My Website Scripts are actually very useful if your website is over 20 pages with a lot of content. It provides another way for users to find what they are looking for. You cannot make it too easy for users to navigate your website.

There are a lot of other website addons not covered here, but these are the most popular. In the next chapter we will move on to promoting your website after you have it built.