By Michelle Goodrich -- Mandarin DesignYou can make your site interactive in a couple of hours using free online tools. Blogs and Tag boards are free. These are sleek tools that let you make your site interactive.
What is a Blog? It's a web page. Ours looks like this. If you want daily communication with your visitors you can start blogging. No, you don't have to display flashing banner ads. You can set up your blog and begin publishing today using online web-based tools that are free. We use Blogger.com.
Some blogs are online diary style while others have created their entire site using blogs. Updates are arranged by date. The setup is quick and everything is customizable. You select a template from an elite variety and then customize it to suit your taste and style.
Daily updates are quick and easy. The tools do all of the behind-the-scenes work. The blog can be hosted free or it can be stored at your site. How? It will ask you about your site and FTP information the first time through. After that, you simply update your blog and it posts to your site automatically. Blogger transfers the files for you.
The setup is easy. Don't be shy. Blogs are worth exploring for both personal and professional use. Once you have set up a blog you may want a tag board in the blog. Take a peek at our blog where we combine the energy of the blog and the Tag board.
Tag boards are even easier to set up than blogs. We set ours up at Tag-board.com and were up and running within a few minutes. Zonkboard also takes only five minutes to set up. The shout box at myshoutbox.com is free for your blog or homepage.
Customizing Tag Boards
Sure, we are still playing around with colors and style but
that's because Tag-board has easy setup pages that lets you change
the fonts, colors, scrollbar colors, and more.
In a few minutes you can be up and running your own tag board. These are low-tech solutions that are powerful and make your site come alive. The tag board displays the last 20 or so short messages from your visitors. Your visitors can post to the tag board and you can reply, or you can carry on real-time conversations. It's free fun.