Links:
Writing
Samples
Adding Chat To Your Site Drives More Traffic
By Andre Hinds
From Income Opportunities magazine, 2000
You've spent time and effort to get people to your website -- creating well-designed pages and filling all the empty banner ad slots. But when you look at the website statistics, you discover that your hard-won visitors are leaving about as quickly as they arrived.
Keeping them on your site isn't as easy as you originally imagined. Once they've glanced at your website content, they're off to investigate something on another website. They're gone, and it's going to take quite an effort to get them back.
One thing your website probably lacks is a feeling of community. People might have been drawn to your website because of a love for whatever it is your site focuses on -- Coke bottle collecting, for instance. However, a website can be a lonely place if the visitor thinks he is all alone.
The easiest way to instill a feeling of community is to let your website visitors talk to one another. The most direct way to do that is to install a chat room on your site.
Anyone who has used America Online or ICQ knows about online chat. A chat room generally consists of a few dozen people with like interests gathered together. Although the talk in the chat room is not always related to the subject of the room, there is one thing they all have in common -- they're hanging out in a common place instead of wandering around alone in a dozen different places on the Internet.
Installing a chat room on your website can help you in a number of ways:
-- It will allow people of like interests to get acquainted with one another.
-- It will cause them to think of your website as the first place to go to find other people interested in a particular topic.
-- It will cause them to tell others interested in that topic who wouldn't otherwise find out about your website.
-- It will hold them to a specific web page, where they can view your banner ads.
When I created a website for Lost Treasure magazine in 1996, one of the first features we installed was a fully functional chat service. It caught on very quickly, and treasure hunters from Alaska to Florida made it their home for hours at a time. In terms of page views, it was always among the top five pages viewed each month. And no other page on the site was viewed for more hours than the chat page.
Options for creating website chat have grown greatly since those early days, but there are still only two different types of website chats to choose from: chat programs that are served directly from your web server and chat programs that are hosted by third-party vendors.
One example of a chat program that is served directly from your server is Web Crossing (www.webcrossing.com). Among the sites using Web Crossing are The New York Times, "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Lycos and Hanson.net (the website for the teen music group Hanson).
One reason for the popularity of Web Crossing is its cross-platform nature. The company creates chat servers for nearly every computer server platform that serves web pages, including Windows, Macintosh and many flavors of UNIX, including Linux.
It has the ability to display banner ads, create live event auditoriums and even let you give web tours and conduct focus groups. Of course, as with any web server software, Web Crossing requires a healthy effort to administer the program.
If you're just getting your feet wet in chat, you might opt instead for a chat program that is hosted by a third-party vendor. The simplest way to do this is to create a web page on an existing chat site and simply provide a link to it from your website.
For example, it's easy to create a new chat room in a portal site, such as Yahoo, and create instructions on your site on how your visitors can get there. If you know a little HTML or Javascript, you can even create a frame window or a floating window that displays the chat page while keeping your website just a click away.
Unfortunately, this solution doesn't let your visitor know he's there courtesy of your site. A new solution from the Web Crossing folks helps here. World Crossing (www.worldcrossing.com) is a free third-party chat site that you can customize with your website logo to make it better resemble your site. Then, when you're ready to upgrade to your own Web Crossing chat server, you don't have to learn a whole new server software program.
However, simply choosing a chat software package, installing it and administering it do not end your responsibility to protect your company from the potential liability it can incur as it allows any web visitor to contribute his two cents in an online chat.
Some of the pitfalls of adding online chat to your website include:
-- Libel -- The anonymity of the Web causes people to sometimes say things they wouldn't say if their real names were being posted in a chat room. Your website chatters are going to say bad things about other people, and because you're providing the forum, you could be considered responsible.
-- Profanity -- Although some of the high-end chat programs provide a simple filter for bad words, chatters have become creative in the ways to display profanity in a chat room.
-- Sex -- To my chagrin, I actually caught a couple of people in our Lost Treasure website having cybersex in the chat room very late one night. It seems that chat rooms have become the safe-sex back seats of the 21st century.
-- Hackers -- As with e-mail, online chat sites have become a focal point for hackers who want to cause mischief. Any programmer with enough time and knowledge can figure out a way to make the chat experience difficult or even impossible. Some even use chat pages to break into the computers of other chatters to steal passwords, credit-card numbers and other valuable data.
-- Trouble-makers -- As the old saying goes, "You can't please all the people all the time." By giving your visitors a forum to air their views, you are also giving your enemies a forum.
You're going to have to decide how you are going to control these things -- by doing nothing, by answering each critic's complaints or by outright censorship.
In order to avoid problems before they started, I posted the following statement on the Lost Treasure page that visitors used to sign up to chat: "Although you can chat on any topic, keep in mind that we are aiming this service at serious treasure hunters. We also ask that you keep your comments positive and civil."