Chapter 16: Counters, Guestbooks and Search Engines

Note: This chapter only applies if your web page is stored on a web server, and not on your local hard drive.

Both counters and guestbooks require access to the web server on which your web pages are hosted, and the ability to write CGIs.

However, for those of us who host our web pages at a service provider, and not on our own web server, and do not want to write our own CGIs, there are free services who offer counters and guestbooks.

Counters

A counter is just what you would imagine it to be: a count of how many people have accessed your web site.
This is very useful information, but not necessarily information you would like to display to everyone! If you don't expect your site to get many "hits" (visits), consider displaying the counter on a page that only you know the address for, and not on your main home page.

The following web sites will keep count for you, and provide you with various ways of accessing the counter:

Count 4 Allhttp://www.count4all.com/
WebTrackerhttp://www.fxweb.holowww.com/tracker/
Internet Counthttp://www.icount.com/


Guestbooks

A guestbook is a page where visitors can enter comments about your site, and especially view the comments left by other people.

The following web sites provide you with free guestbook facilities (they typically provide you with a page where visitors enter comments, and then store all the entered comments for you):

Piett Guestbookshttp://www.piett.com/pgb/
LPagehttp://www.lpage.com/

Search Engines

If you are providing a commercial service, it is a good idea to submit your web page location to several different search engines. All the major search engines provide you with a screen where you can submit your location. Look for a link to this on their home pages.

There are also a few services which will submit your location for you to many different search engines at once, saving you having to go to each search engine yourself.

The most well-known of these services is SubmitIt: http://www.submit-it.com/. Links to a few such sites can be found at http://www.submit.com/sub/.

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