Making Your Site Interactive – Add Chat!

Blogs or other social networking sites provide a great opportunity for a webmaster to interact with readers / viewers – through comments on posts, or a contact form. But wouldn’t it be great if you as webmaster could chat instantaneously with them – or allow them to talk to each other? That would make commenting much more of a “conversation” than just having comments that get replies after hours!

Help is at hand. From Geesee! They provide a simple HTML / Javascript code that you can add to your website, together with creating a chatroom for your site. All discussion actually takes place on the Geesee site, and the app does provide for users to join any chatroom they choose. As such, it might be a negative – who’d want to have their viewers go away from the site?

But it isn’t necessary all bad. For starters, you do have your own chatroom, and typically a viewer who’s interested in chatting related to your topics is likely to start there. Even if he does go off afterwards, hey, that could happen anyway – especially if you have external links on your site. And you never know – he might decide to come back later for more.

The other problem you might face, is if you’re a solitary webmaster. How long would you be able to stay online, just in case your visitor wants to chat? This might benefit larger websites – forums, multi-blogger sites like Profy where depending on the time of day, one or the other authors might be online.

Peekko and Chatsum have plug-ins for browsers, that help viewers on the same website to chat – but the webmaster doesn’t take part, and probably doesn’t even know it’s there. Geesee seems to be a better alternative.

I’m testing this out below, just to see. I’m including the HTML / Javascript in this post, even though WordPress is sometimes finicky about having code in a post – let’s see if this actually pops up. If not, I’ll request our administrator to try it out on the page template.

There’s also a link to start the chat – please right-click and open it up. Look for the room named “Profy”.

www.geesee.com
Geesee – free live chat for your website.

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