One of the main goals inbuilding a website is to get visitors to it and then to get them coming back. One way that this can be doneis to add the so-called 'sticky' features or the things that make people want to return. Both forums and chatrooms are good examples of including an element of stickiness in a website but surely they are hard to include? Not at all as there are several ways to add either.

Adding forums, which are sometimes called message boards, is outside the scope of this article but it is quite straightforward. A chatroom can be added in many ways though and all of them allow the page owner to begin with a free service. However not all are equal and some issues need to be considered.

The first thing to consider is how you as a site owner see your chat developing. It is pointless to begin with a free service which has no upgrade route if you see your chatroom becoming more than just a free service from your site. Normally the situation with free services is that the room owner lacks any admin privileges and therfore has no control over what happens in the room and this always seems to lead to friction due to that minority of users who choose to be annoying. Upgrading to a paid service then brings the admin rights so the room owner does have control.

So now you have decided to add chat to your site and are wondering what to use? There is a lot out there that you can try but it seems to me that there are two solid solutions that offer the upgrade route if you want to move your room to the next level. One is Parachat (www.parachat.com) and the other is addonchat (www.addonchat.com). Both offer a free room that anybody can use and then offer upgrades that give admin rights to the room owner.

So if you are looking to add chat to your site then which to choose? Well having tried out both I went with Parachat. In some ways addonchat does have more functionality but it does seem to suffer from lag when in chat. The other benefit of Parachat is that it allows a site owner to create a room that is visible to anybody who comes to the Parachat website. The benefit of this is that people visit you chat room without needing to do any advertising. The downside is that there is no control over who visits so, with my room, I get into regular debates with under 16s when I try to tell them that it is a room for over 21s. However the visibility is how I have got people to come to the room so I suffer the problems in the interest of getting the exposure.

So how to build a room? Well the approach that I use is a combination of free and paid. I have both a free and a paid room at Parachat. I use the free room as a means to find new chatters and the paid room as the place to get them to. I have other goodies to entice them too. If you would like to see how I use this in practice then my website is www.chateau-tuxyn.com

Go ahead and add chat to your site if you think your visitors will join in because it is a good way to get them coming back

Learn more about this author, Ian Bewcastle.
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