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This banner was supplied by SAFE Audit
There are many places that will give you free webspace to set up your own page on the net, and you're already looking at a page that is being hosted by such a service. This page is paid for by the banner advert at the bottom. You will usually need to learn how to write HTML (That's the computer code that's used to write web pages - for a list of places that can teach you HTML try here) and upload files, though some free web site providers do provide an option where you can set up a simple looking page for yourself by filling out a simple form, and no knowledge of HTML is needed. Some of the more generous providers will give you up to 10 Mb of memory.To give an idea of size, this page (excluding graphics) would fit into 10Mb over 200 times!.
Like free Email, there are many places that offer this service, so I have just put direct links on this page to some of the better known providers, plus some links to other sites which link to many others.
| ANGELFIRE | GEOCITIES | TRIPOD |
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Once you've set up your webpage, you may want to host a few banners on it to get a little pocket money back for your efforts. There are many places on the net that offer you the chance to do this, though whether they are all legit or not I cannot say!
I was approached by my webspace provider (Fortunecity), and asked to test this service (Safe Audit) out for them, and they seem to be above board. Once your site has been approved by them you can host any of their banners you choose from their list. Each banner provider agrees to pay you on an agreed formula when you display their banner. This is usually based on either a rate per "click through" or per exposure or by sales generated. To give you an idea, the current best payment available on a "per click through" basis is currently 15 US cents ( = 9 UK pence, though this will get better when the pound stops being rediculously over-valued!). You can choose to be paid in either UK pounds or US dollars. To find out more about Safe Audit, click the banner below. This is, of course, also a working example of a Safe-Audit banner.
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Registering with any of these services gives you access to various statistical information regarding visits to your page.As well as number of hits, these services give information on things like times of visits, location of visitors, types of browsers used, etc. Using these services usually require you to put an advert banner or button on your page in order to use them.
There are some working examples of these services on the Homepage for this site here. Of the 4 services I have used, I would recommend Extreme Tracking if you are interested in demographic details of the visitors to your page, in view of the large variety of information they give you. However if accuracy of hit counts is more important to you, I would recommend you use Web side story.
| BRAVENET | THECOUNTER.COM | EASYCOUNTER | EXTREME TRACKING |
| FREE STATS | NEDSTAT | WEB SIDE STORY | WEBTRACKER |
Once you have set up your webpage, a Guestbook is a good way of getting feedback. Here are some links to places that will let you have one for free.
| BRAVENET | DREAMBOOKS | FREEGUESTBOOKS.COM |
| GUESTBOOKS.NET | GUESTBOOKS UNLIMITED | GUESTPAD |
| GUESTWORLD | SPIN GUESTBOOKS | TOASTBOOK |
| WEBAPPS | WEBPOST GUESTBOOKS | |
Alternatively, you may want to use a message board instead.
| BRAVENET | INSIDE THE WEB | VANTAGENET | WEBAPPS |
These services let you put survey or voting forms on your page
| BRAVENET | DIGITAL SOLUTIONS | INSTA-POLL |
| SURVEY ENGINE | VANTAGENET |
If ( like this page !) the URL of your webpage bears no resemblance to the content of your site, and is difficult to remember, then these services may be able to help. Choose a URL that is appropriate for your site, and simply use that URL instead of your "proper" one. Anyone using this new, easy to remember, URL is automatically transfered to your site. Also has the advantage that you do not need to change your address if you move servers, though on the downside if the server of this service provider goes down, then no one can reach your site either. I have used one such address for this site (http://come.to/gadgets), which I got from V3 Redirect Services.
| CJB.NET | INTERNETJUMP | ONTHEWEB.NU | OVERTO |
| V3 REDIRECT SERVICES | VISITWEB | WEBALIAS | |
You've probably seen hundreds of Emailing lists that you can join, but what if you want to start up your own list? Well these services let you set up and run a list of your own for free. I have used "Listbot" to run the mailing list for this page, see Join My Mailing List.
| BRAVENET | COOLLIST | LISTBOT | ONE1IST | WEBAPPS |
So you've set up your own web page and you need to find ways to persuade people to visit it. Here are a few ideas.
One of the first things you'll want to do once your webpage goes online is to let search engines know about it. You can go to any search engine and find a form to submit your site to it, but to do this for all search engines is very time consuming. Fortunately, there are sites that enable you to send your site details to several Search Engines, Internet publications and links pages in one go. It should be noted that as these sites don't take into account some of the finer details of some search engines' submission processes, this method may not be as effective as registering your site directly, but they will save you one hell of a lot of time! Note also that you usually have to wait for several weeks after submitting your URL before it appears on many Search Engines. Finally, I would personally recommend Broadcasters service (which last time I looked submitted your site to 165 different places).
| ADDME | BROADCASTER | REGISTER-IT | SUBMIT-IT |
There are many pages on the net that will let you place a link to your page on their site, by just filling out a simple form. I don't know how effective they are at generating traffic, but having lots of pages linking to you does help your rating with some search engines.
ACCUSUBMIT - Free For All Links Submit Station. - The following site contains links to several hundred such pages. Unfortunately, It doesn't supply a form that lets you submit your site to all of them in one go! It does have a submission page (crikey, a page where frames are useful!) with a "cut & paste" area to help make submitting your site to each one individually a lot quicker, but putting your link on every site would still be a very slow process.
LINKOMATIC - This site will send your URL to 10 ( high traffic - so they say) Free for all pages with one click. You can use the free version of this service once a week, but unfortunately it has a habit of attempting to send your URL to the same sites each time (even though they claim to know of 400 FFA sites). Having said that I have got a couple of hits due to this service (a couple more than I've got from some other places!)
IWR.COM - Contains links to several hundred more "Free For All" pages
Many individuals and organisations on the net run their own Award schemes. This site enables you to apply for over a hundred such awards in one go. If successful you will get a nice little graphic to place on your page for each award you win, and (this is what you really hope for ) if you're lucky the awarder may link to your page from theirs. I am convinced many (though by no means all) of these schemes exist to try to persuade you to link back to the awarder, and I sometimes wonder if setting up your own award is a more productive use of your time than applying for other peoples! To see the awards this site has won, see my Awards Page.
In some ways a glorified list of links, Webrings link up sites with similar themes into "rings", click on a webring graphic on any member page to get a list of links to the next 5 pages in the same ring. There are many thousands of rings in existence, and each one may contain anything from one to several hundred sites. Many differing themes are covered, in fact think of any subject you like and there's probably already a webring on that topic in existence. This page is a member of the Resource Webring, Fortunecity's Hot In The City webring, the Ring O'Free Stuff and the Free Stuff webring.
WEB SIDE STORY - Provides "Top 1000" lists of sites in many different categories, and since there are usually less than 1000 sites in each section, you should be able to get you site on the top 1000 list. Ratings are based on the average "unique hits per day" since joining the scheme ( or resetting your WSS counter ). The problem with this system for small sites, is that to get hits from it you need to be near the top of one of the lists . . to be near the top of the list you need a lot of hits. A bit of a chicken and egg problem here! Also provides statistics for your page (see previous section).
SOPRANO.COM - This one rates sites in categories, by votes. You can vote for a site on the list by voting for it at their site, or you also automatically vote for this site by following the link on this site to their page ( hint, hint !! ), alternatively you can click on their button on my homepage. Since the ratings are based on a "rolling week", you may vote for this site once per week.
TOP 100 - This site works on a similar principle to Web Side Story, ranking sites in several different categories by number of hits per day. There are far less sites listed here than on WSS, so this is a good place for lesser-known sites to get recognised.
TOP 50.TO - Works on votes, similar to SOPRANO.COM. You can vote for this site by following the link here, or clicking their button on my homepage. Voting appears to be counted on a daily basis, so you may vote for this page daily.
A nice idea this, you agree to place an advert banner on your page, and in return an advert for your page appears on pages of other banner exchange scheme members. Your banner will usually get a set ratio of exposures on other pages per visit to your page, this ratio is usually about 2:1 or 3:2 You do, of course, have to provide your own advert banner. The next section may be able to help you with this, though personally I prefer to use an ordinary graphics programme. These services also usually provide some fairly basic statistics about hits on your page.
The banners below are working examples of banners I display for Banner Exchange schemes, the first is for Linkexchange (probably the best known exchange scheme on the net), and the second is for Mind Waves (This scheme is only open to pages hosted by Fortunecity). I would recommend Mind Waves to anyone who has a site at Fortunecity.
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This site links to many other Banner Exchange Schemes
They say one of the best ways to get a website promoted is by word of mouth, and this gadget lets you put a form on your page that gives visitors to your site a simple means of sending the URL of your site to their friends by Email. To add the form to your page only involves copying a small ammount of HTML code onto your page, so it is simple to use from the webmaster point of view too. I have set up a working example of this site on my home page here.
Need some graphics to put on your website? - These sites will help you generate some.
| THE BANNER GENERATOR | INSTANT ONLINE BANNER CREATOR |
| TIMZ DESIGNS |
This banner was supplied by SAFE Audit
These sites check various aspects of your webpage, as detailed below.
Browser Compatibility - Will some of your coding not come out the way you expected on certain browsers?
HTML check - Checks the accuracy of you HTML code, I have to say I'm not over-impressed with the standard of these services in this area, , and apart from correcting any serious errors these services point out, I would not take their results too seriously.
Link check - Checks the links on your page are still "live".
Links popularity - Do many other sites link back to you?
Load time - How quickly does your page load?
Search Engine popularity - How do the major Search Engines rate your site?
Search Engine readiness - Checks your Meta tags.
Server check - How good is your server?
Spelling checker - Uses US English.
As a general rule, I would recommend Websitegarage for most of these services, except for HTML check and Link checking. For link checking I'd recommend Netmechanic.
WEBSITEGARAGE - Browser Compatibility, HTML check, Link check, Links popularity, Load time, Search Engine readiness, Spelling checker.
NETMECHANIC - HTML check, Link check, Server check.
POSITIONAGENT - Search Engine popularity.
WEBTECHS - HTML check.
SUBMIT-IT - Search Engine readiness.
DID-IT DETECTIVE - Search Engine popularity.
A KINDER, GENTLER HTML VALIDATOR - HTML check.
DR WATSON - HTML check, Link check, Spelling checker.
RANK THIS! - Search Engine popularity.
INSPECTOR WEB - Link check.
FREE INTERNET SERVER MONITORING - Server check.
This service enables you to put a search engine on your site, that enables visitors to search for items on your site only.
This site lets you put a form on your webpage that lets visitors send Internet Postcards from your site. Any postcard sent from your site also includes your URL, so is also another way to promote your site. For more information on Internet Postcards, see the item on the General Gadgets Page.
This site can basically host a page of links for you, to save you having to put such a page on your own server, so this could be useful if your ISP is a little mean on the number of MBs it lets you use. It is also apparently easier to amend links using this service than it would be to edit the links on an HTML file you've set up yourself, though I'm not convinced about this. Another possible use for this service is as an online bookmark file, though as the URL you get is not an easy to remember one, this service is not ideal for this purpose. For a service specifically designed as an online bookmarks file, see here.