Guestbooks for the Website

Guestbooks for the Website

Websites which offer a dynamic interaction from the people have always been successful with more number of returning visitors. A very static webpage always invites only a few visitors who need the information for that point of time.

So what are the ways in which a webuser can register his opinion with the website? The sky is the limit for the channels that can be opened up for the same.

Traditionally, guestbooks have been the most preferred choice for webmasters, be it big websites or little personal hobby pages.

There is nothing in the world that claims a hundred percent perfection. There always remains a scope for further improvement and development. A good guestbook for a website can invite comments on a particular thought expressed in the website, get attention on a failing component of a website or a suggestion towards a better enhancement of the same.

Is it too difficult to configure a guestbook for a website. Not at all. Creating, Configuring and Maintaining a guestbook had and would never be a pain but rather a pleasure. When your kid gets comments from his teacher on getting first rank in his class subjects in the examinations, you would be happy right. It is quite similar to that, when your visitors leave suggestions for your website.

To start with, you can check out a lot of open source implementation of guestbooks, which you can download, configure and use them on your website. However, if you are afraid of technical configuration, there are a lot of remotely hosted guestbook solutions too.

We would like to summarize a few of them for your convenience.

Source Guestbooks

1. Guestbook Application from WebWizGuide
2. ASP Guestbook from Uwe Keim

Third-Party Solutions

1. Flash GuestBook from PepFx Design

RemotelyHosted Solutions

1. Bravenet Guestbook
2. SmartGuestbook

Tutorial of creating a Guestbook (in ASP)

1. Guestbook Tutorial from Joshua Bengal.

Tips on Maintaining Guestbooks

1. Check out administrative control panel of the guestbook once in a while to ensure that no unrelated or junk messages are posted to guestbooks.
2. To prevent spammers and spam robots from posting junk comments to your guestbooks, you can make use of CAPTCHA trick. Integrating a CAPTCHA trick is very easy in any of the solution. For more information on CAPTCHA, check out this post.
3. It would also be better to have a Private Message checkbox so that some users can send a message to you and then later you can edit and with the consent of the user make it appear in the Guestbook. The concept of Private Messages is in fact a debated issue. Some consider that these are like Contact Forms but their significance is always come to stay.