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 Sub Categories | Shoutboxes - Adding a Shoutbox to Your Website Blog or Forum
Shoutboxes, also known as Sayboxes, Tagboards, and Chatboxes, can be a great way to retain your website or blog visitors. In their simplest form, shoutboxes are simply lists of short messages, possibly with information about their authors. The page may be automatically refreshed after a certain interval, or polled dynamically in order to keep new messages visible. Older posts are often deleted after a certain number of messages have been written in order to preserve space on the server. Forums, shout boxes, bulletin boards, live help services and other customer feedback utilities can give you an insight to the growing trends and demands of your industry and allow you to address inquiries regarding your website or product. By making your site socially interactive for your visitors by creating polls, or adding a shoutbox to your site, encourages people to participate, chat and become more involved on your site by voicing their opinions and don't we all love giving out our opinions (sometimes even when not asked). As conversations grow, people may soon start developing a sense of community that would make them keep coming back to your website again and again, this is called making your website "sticky". Most shoutbox offer two versions - free and paid. The free version usually requires the page the chat box is on to be refreshed before new postings will show up. This is fine for those just wishing to leave on site messages, however it would make carrying on a conversation very hard due to having to manually refresh the page after each posting. With the paid version the chat area will continue to scroll without the need for page refreshes, plus the paid version usually offers more admin features such as the ability to change color styles, layout, font sizes, ban users, chat logs etc. It is well worth updating to the paid version as the cost for a paid chatbox is very low at between $15 and $40 per year. If you want to add a shoutbox to your blog, website, or forum, you should try to find one that was made with the software you're using specifically in mind, as it is more likely to look more "natural" with the styles you're using. Additionally, you ahould try to keep the shoutbox from featuring too prominently on your page, so be conservative with its height and width, and make sure members have the ability to minimize or close it. I would also make the shoutbox viewable only to members to help decrease spam and undesirable comments being posted by guests. There are many free and paid services online that offer flash javascript, and html code to add a shoutbox to your website. Shoutboxes - Articles and Reviews
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If you are looking for a simple means of communicating with your website or blog users or a way for users to leave messages for the site owner, or as a basic chat room, for your website or blog visitors then adding a simple shout box is probably the best way to go.
