Features

It's at this stage that you can finally start building your actual site. Take your original content plan and decide more precisely what pages you'll need. Then put them in place.

You may also like to add some extra features on your site. In this section, we'll go over some of the most common things you can include.

Feedback

It's important to let people send you comments on your site, as these can be really useful when it comes to updating and improving things later. The level of interaction between you and your visitors will depend on the subject of the site, so you decide what's appropriate. At the very least provide an e-mail address which can be used to send comments, or you could add a dedicated mail form to a feedback page. This has the advantage of hiding your email address.

More information on mail forms can be found in the Forms guide.

Another alternative is to use a guest book. This feature lets your visitors type their details and comments into a form, which are then added to a bulletin board of entries. You'll need a specialised script (e.g. CGI or PHP) to do this, which your ISP may provide. You can also use external guest books - many of these can be customised to fit in with the look of your site. Check the resources section for further help on this.

Keep In Touch

If you're likely to update your site regularly, you could set up a mailing list for your visitors to optionally subscribe to. You could then send a quick e-mail each time you update the site, making is less likely that you'll be forgotten.

Somewhere on each page you could also add the date when it was last updated.

Monitoring Traffic

So that you know how popular your site is, you can add hit counters and trackers to your pages. There are a huge range of facilities available (some ISP's offer them with your web space) - basic counters just tell you how many hits (times a page was viewed) a page has received while more advanced services tell you where people linked to your site from, what browser they use etc. Many counters can be completely invisible as well, so they won't change your carefully designed pages.

Sitemeter provide the tracking for code-warrior.

Search Engines

If you've got a substantial number of pages, consider adding a search facility to your site. Normally this would require considerable programming, but again there are sites that provide an excellent service in return for an ad or a logo here and there. You can normally customise the results page to make it fit in with your site design.

Atomz provide the search function for code-warrior.

Making Money

There are lots of schemes on the web to let you make money from your site. Paste a few logos here and there and if someone clicks on one then you get 1p or something similar.

Generally advertising doesn't prove that successful and you're unlikely to make big money from your site.

Instead of plain advertisements, you may be able to take advantage of an affiliate scheme. Many shopping sites (Amazon, for example) will pay you commission from any sales resulting from links from your site. Once you've signed up they send you some special HTML to add links to their site. They track sales and pay you accordingly.

Sites which would benefit most from this are those which are related to the goods on sale. So if you were doing a 'Teach Yourself HTML' site, you could add links to HTML related books on Amazon which your visitors could use to buy the books.

See what fits in with your site, but on the whole (especially for small sites) you're not going to make much at all.

For links to web site feature providers, click here.