Visitors to your website will typically be comfortable with online communication methods and will have their own email address. They may wish the convenicence of contacting you by email and will expect to find a contact email address listed on your website.

Your web site address is how visitors find your web site (our is seeit.co.uk). You might like to have an email address that makes use of this same address such as sales@seeit.co.uk. You could also use a personal email address and there are plenty of places where free email addresses can be acquired.

One thing you may not have realised is that listing your email address on your web site will vastly increase the amount of junk or spam email that you receive. The reason for this is that unscrupulous people have created programs that trawl the web looking for email addresses which are harvested and sold to spammers. To avoid this you can opt to have a contact form on your site rather than list your email address directly. You can see an example of this on our contact us page.

You may also wish to send email automatically from your website. This may be in confirmation of a purchase within an eCommerce system or perhaps you would like visitors to register for a regular newsletter dispatched via email.

In some circumstances it is desirable to use your web site to host a structured discussion between your site visitors. These applications are very popular within IT support where people experiencing problems can seek help not only from the manufacturer but from other consumers. The conversation then exists on the web site allowing future visitors with the same problem to access the information on how to resolve their problem.

A forum generally consists of a main title describing broadly the topics that can be included. Within that, people can create threads which are a collection of individual yet related messages. The messages are called posts and the person creating the thread will also create the first post perhaps asking for assistance or promoting some kind of discussion. Anyone who has registered to use the Forum can then add their own message and participate in the discussion.

One thing to bear in mind is that often Forums require moderation by the web site owner to ensure that nothing unsavoury or unwanted has been posted. Ultimately, the content is published on your web site so you do not want any negative fall out from a poorly judged post by an individual.

A key factor in adopting a forum is that there must be a critical mass of your site visitors willing to use it. If nobody is making a contribution, the content will stagnate and people will stop visiting your forum.

There are several popular forum packages available and we have also written our own to have more contol over integration across the whole web site.

The term blog is an abbreviation of 'Web Log' and is a web site where you can post regular commentary or bulletins on what is happening in your organisation.

If you wish to provide regular updates to visitors to your website then you can use this method. An example of its use could be a charity posting regularly on their web site to let visitors know how a particular project was evolving or how funds were being spent. The key word here is 'regularly' since a blog that has not been updated recently is unlikely to incur a repeat visit.

There are also dedicated blog web sites where you can create your own blog and simply link to it from your own web site. Popular examples include blogger.com which is owned by Google and myyblog.com from Yahoo.

Blogs vary in quality from peoples opinions on almost any topic to useful posts such as 'how to' guides and product reviews, etc. You can read more at the online encyclopedia: Wikipedia