subject: Website Works - How To Improve Your Site With Free Add-ons And Accessories [print this page] It's easy to find a great array of free website services. They are as old as the Web itself. Wherever there has been someone trying to gain traffic, there has been someone putting up free content or features for others to link to and send them traffic. Counters, basic chatrooms, free e-cards, guestbooks, polls, calendars, and basic forums are just a few examples. Less common were paid services that were ad-free, thereby allowing webmasters to offer this feature to their web site visitors without bombarding them with ads for someone else's program. Such programs, due to the great cost of bandwidth in those days, were typically expensive. Most had few extravagant features.
In the modern age of cheap bandwidth, low-cost storage and overall inexpensive hosting, even the free plugins have improved dramatically in quality and variety. The old stable of staples has added such new features as free video, free podcast streaming, free podcast hosting, high-end shopping carts, free digital clocks and basic stock tickers, free interactive games including free flash games and other interfaces, free interactive interfaces like virtual pet adoption centers, news and information tickers, free photo and other content hosting, free content feeds, virtual site pals, inter-messenger services, spreadsheet-style calendars, translators, message centers from which to check multiple email accounts, web site visitor email, iframe apps, social media network based messaging and voting, visitor maps, and weather. Free hosting has been around since the invention of the Net, but quality hosting that allows for free streaming media is a very recent development.
Probably the most powerful add-on features are things like a video channel changer, world time digital clocks, virtual MP3 players, screen-in-screen streaming video windows, complex stock tickers, video-like games, free SMS, multiple search engine search, cyber security threat notifications, Internet weather, and complex real world weather add-ons like weather forecasting. The web site visitors can learn the time wherever they are, how stocks are doing, if they have messages, if the MAE-East Internet Exchange Point is bogging down, and what the weather is going to be like. They need never leave the webmaster's web site to do any of this, which is sort of the point of adding them. The longer a web site visitor stays on a site, the more likely they are to bookmark it.
Service add-ons, such as table-makers, form creators, form handlers, and the like have always been popular. Now they can handle much more sophisticated tasks. They've been joined by mailing list hosts to keep track of regular web site visitors, voice mail services, cybersecurity threats, visitor sticky notes, and rec links. The old forums and guestbooks have become forum-works and guestbook centers.
What is in the future? Probably bigger and better forms of what already exists, though it's hard to say in which directions the architecture will evolve. As apps become increasingly more sophisticated, the space between online sites and personal computers may become very narrow indeed. Our entire website and Web experience may converge into a single interface of interactivity. Once that convergence happens, the route of the pathway to the future will be anybody's guess.
