Build Community

"Community" and "building community" are strong buzzwords on the internet right now - and indeed have been for some time.

And rightly so - the underlying idea is that it isn't enough to just pitch product at your visitors. Far more successful is to establish a relationship with them, get to know them, and let them get to know you.

There are many obstacles to buying on-line, and suspicion, concern, and fear of the new are among them. Drawing your visitors into the fold, making them feel they are among like minded people will help them to value your site more highly, make them want to return more often - and be in a positive frame of mind when they get there.

Wouldn't it be great if we could get these "sticky" community facilities integrated with our site for free, with no programming, and have them run on auto-pilot with minimal maintenance?

Maybe even make a little money out of it?

Would you expect anything less for your Practical DotCom Business by now?

Everyone.net lead the field in providing remotely hosted "sticky" features. They offer a number of services - but the one we're going to concentrate on is what they call "community" - just what we're looking for ...

This allows you to set up discussion forums for any number of subjects where your visitors - and you - can read and post messages and carry on-line conversations.

You can even allow real time "chat" sessions where you can have groups of visitors "talking" to each other - via their keyboards.

These are a great forum for posting and answering questions, pointing to facilities on your site, getting your visitors views - and a great reason for people to come back time and time again.

Again, the service runs on their servers - not yours - so its easy to manage and you can customise it extensively so it blends in with your site.

Step By Step

Go to here and sign up.

Choose a standard template to start with - you can change everything about it later.

The main areas you want to look at first are:

Global Settings

... where you set up the overall structure and messages for your community pages.

The example below shows some of the ways you can customise your community pages - do as much or as little as you want. A few things that will help with integration right from the start:

• Colors - match with your main site themes.
• Logo - somewhere to use that square logo you created from the ZY headline?
• Banner ads - again, just paste in the code you got from CGI for Me and the ads will be rotated for you.

Manage Communities

... here you set up the areas for your visitors to meet and discuss in.

I'll repeat one of the pieces of advice given by Everyone.net - better to have a few very active forums than lots of empty forums. You want your site to look busy, active and popular - and there's a way of doing this right from the start.

As well as creating at least one new forum of your own, try to find a relevant shared community that you can add. Shared communities mean that messages can be seen and posted from other sites - but they look the way you want them to when viewed from your site.

It's a great way to create instant activity.

Even stickier ...

I think this "community" service is the most practical to start with, but it's not all that Everyone.net offer.

Their web hosted email service is probably the stickiest service of all. Imagine visitors coming back every day or more to check and send email - from your site!

The problem is that it will probably only be attractive if you have - or are willing to get - a domain name that people will want as their email address.

I made this work at my circustuff.com site by registering the domain name circusmail.net. Lots of circus fans like the idea of being somebody@circusmail.net but they wouldn't be so keen on being somebody@asubdomainof.everyone.net.

Note - to set up this kind of email service with your own domain name, you need a level of control over the DNS functions of your domain that you don't get with most registration/hosting companies. As mentioned earlier, at time of writing, you do get the right kind of control with domains registered at freeparking.co.uk / com. You can check and register domain names with them here:

Anatomy of a PDCB Community Page