Free And Easy To Obtain Website Add-Ons
My advice to new site owners is
"Only upgrade if and when absolutely necessary."
In many cases and right out of the gate, many new website owners are forced to pay for upgraded hosting packages simply because they just don't know any better. As a designer having been faced this scenario on many occassions, I can tell you it's all about getting more money out of consumers who just don't know any better.
Most reputable web hosting companies already provide the basic site add-ons at no extra charge that include:
1. Auto Site Backup
2. 10 email accounts
3. Hosted Forums
4. Hosted Galleries
5. Hosted Blog
and Web Tools that require simple configuration and simple cut-and-paste scripts such as:
6. Web Directory
7. Web Polls
8. Tell-A-Friend
9. FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)
10. Mailing Lists
11. Hit Counter
12. Email Forms
Admittedly with some of the above added site features you lack the freedom to blend these things in with the existing look you might desire, but just the same, they do serve their purpose, in most cases. As well, these companies like to add their "hosted by blah, blah, blah" where these scripts appear, and giving a less polished or professional appearance.
Here are some cool web site add-ons you can get absolutely free, that help improve viewer engagement and usability. I have, at some point used and tested most of these myself.
Don't be fooled into believing you need to upgrade your hosting package only to find out that your initial site investment has doubled.
Here are some suggestions worth checking out.
Tested Quality Free Add-Ons
1. Blog Comments: Allowing site visitors to comment on your blog posts is a great way to get valuable feedback, and allows your viewers to engage with each other. Used by many site owners, Disqus allows you to build your personal online community, share your comments, join other blog discussions,and will even notify you when a comment is posted or shared.
2. Live Chat Support: Tawk.to is a great option when you want to add a live help/chat component to your site. It does allow for some customization to get the look and feel of your existing site and has all the bells and whistles like chat history, multiple agent set-up, visitor banning, aliases, and desktop notifications. The really great feature about this live support add-on is that you can download and use it with their own apps for iPhone and Android for those on the go.They even offer a wordpress plugin. Be careful that you or another team member are available to offer support when required or you may damage your online reputation.
3. Password Protection: When you need to restrict access to important pages on your website, such as customer invoices, easily add, edit, or delete users, customize your login failure/error page to look and feel like your own site and even track how visitors are using and/or abusing this feature. Bravenet offer a great option for such security because
server side authentication occurs on their own servers and not yours , offering you added piece of mind against potential hackers.
4. Social Sharing: Addthis.com has made sharing your site content really easy by a simple copy and paste code insertion. This social bar can be customised to suit your choice of social networks and placed on your page in a variety of locations. Gain followers and get content recommendations with this responsive tool. The beauty of this easy -to-instal add-on is that it can save you valuable space on your actual web site for things you might find more important like a "call to action,"subscriptions, discount offers, downloadable ePapers, and so on.
5. Site Control: Keeping visitors attention with on-screen announcement placed strategically can help keep visitors on your pages and increase viewer conversions by offering a variety of subscriptions or opt-in forms, alerts, notifications, contact forms, and social sharing options that can be placed strategically on any page, are fully customizable, and best of all, you receive a weekly report in your email inbox to keep you up-to-date.
6. Wufoo Embeddable Forms: Wufoo's Form Builder provides the tools for anyone to easily drag and drop an amazing form in just a few short minutes. You can help you collect data without writing a single line of code. In escaping the complexities of creating a database, you can easily customize your forms with a built-in theme designer for just about anything. Use it for event planning, team memberships, payments, mailing lists, product order forms, and with smart captcha to prevent abuse. All of this within an easy user management dashboard and real-time form analytics to see how well they're performing.
7. Image Slideshow Widgets: SnapWidget for Instagram is great for adding slideshows and image galleries to your site, is customizable, is responsive with share button for each photo and supports usernames and hashtags. Another great one is the Flickr Slideshow which allows you to easily create a custom flickr photo slideshow for your website or blog. You can even insert optional tags for your images.
8. Skype Call Button: Add a Skype button to your websites and let people get in touch with just the click of a button. Whether they're on a computer or mobile, they will get through with a voice call or an instant message.
9. Twitter and Facebook Widgets: Embed your tweets, follow button, tweet button, timelines and video.
Like, share, and Send your FB content back to their own profile or timeline. You can also embed your own posts and video player across all platforms - web, Android, and iOS.
10. Google translate: Do you have non-english speaking fans? Do you want non-english speaking fans? Can’t hurt right? Google translate will help foreign speakers understand your website with the click of a button. Note: It’s not perfect. A human translation will always be better but it gets the job done.
11. Google Analytics: One of the greatest analytic web tools available is totally free. Monitor traffic, social engagement, search rankings, and more. All you have to do is enter your Google Analytics ID on each page.
I could carry on forever with this list forever and I'm pretty sure you too could add several great items to this list. But this is certainly a great start for any web design newbie without any coding knowledge. I haven't even touched upon the app world for those who strictly use mobile devices, and of course, this list would be endless.
The trick here is find find a balance between website add-ons and your actual site content so as not to distract your viewers, make your life simpler, and still get the task at hand completed successfully.
Author: Brent Vanderham / CompuAssist
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