Web Site Support - Extras

Adobe PDF Online - An online service that can convert documents of all types into Adobe PDF-format documents that anyone can view with the freely distributed Adobe Acrobat Reader software. You may convert 5 documents for free, or pay a monthly/yearly subscription fee and convert unlimited documents. (thanks, Bob Niemann.)

ASPCode.Net - Free Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side applications (like guestbooks and polls) that you can add to your Web site, to make it more interactive.

Bogglers - Free "brain teasers, mind benders, visual riddles, and basically a ton of fun" that you can add to add to your Web site by just copying and pasting a few lines of code.

CREDIT CARD PAYMENTS - PayPal lets you inexpensively accept secure credit card payments for items that you sell on your Web site. PayPal is used by thousands of buyers and sellers on the world-famous eBay auction site.

Easy Submit - How can you get your Web site listed on all the big search engines? Well, first of all, make sure you've added the correct Keywords Meta tag to at least your Home Page. Then, try out this free service that makes it easy to manually submit your Web site to more than 50 different search engines.

EMAIL CHECKERS - MailStart - Make your site more "sticky" by adding a free email checker box to it. All you have to do is copy their HTML code and paste it into the HTML code of your Web page. If you know enough about HTML to be able to create your own Submit form to send users' email usernames and passwords to their site, you can use a more powerful email checker from Mail2Web that can also handle email attachments.

FEEDBACK FORMS - Response-O-Matic and Freedback and Whiz Mail - Want to add a free customized online feedback or comment form to your site, with the results automatically emailed to you? Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, ComputerBob's Registration Form, the one you used to become a registered member of ComputerBob's Forum, is a feedback form. It's possible to create a feedback form in FrontPage itself, but only if your hosting service has FrontPage extensions installed on their server. It's also possible to do it if your hosting service supports CGI scripting, but then you'd have to learn how to use CGI scripting. If you can't do either of those, then these sites will automatically create customized online forms for your site and they'll take care of hosting the server-side processing of those forms for you.

FORUMS - AnyBoard - This was the company that hosted ComputerBob's Forum for free for nearly 3 years, until I finally decided to install and configure free phpBB2 forum software (which I later replaced with Invision Power Board forum software) to run on my own Web server. AnyBoard's forums are somewhat reliable and have several configuration options, but it can be very complicated to configure one exactly the way you want it to look, plus AnyBoard adds annoying banners and hard-to-get-rid-of pop-up advertisements to every page of your free hosted forum. I stopped using AnyBoard's free hosted forums because I thought that all the adverstisements were driving away my site's visitors. For a simpler, free forum that is easier to set up, see Proboards and EZBoard and FreeWebWare and Delphi Forums and Network54 and Boards2Go and SmartGroups and Bravenet.

GREETING CARDS - 123Greetings is the site that hosts ComputerBob's Greeting Card service, letting my site's visitors send over 2000 different electronic greeting cards, with graphics, animations, and sounds. The most amazing part is, it's all free. You can register to have them provide free greeting card hosting services to your Web site's visitors, too. All-Yours offers a similar free greeting card service, and their site has an impressive-looking card creation page, with lots of card image thumbnails. Unfortunately, if you sign up to use the All-Yours service on your own Web site, your site's visitors won't see that impressive-looking card creation page -- they'll see a pretty plain looking card creation page instead, with lots of text links instead of image thumbnails.

HOSTED SERVICES (miscellaneous) - Sparklit and FreeWebWare and Bravenet and Freesticky and The CGI Resource Index and Scriptomatic.net and HotScripts and HomePageTools and StickyTools and Xavier Media and Net3Media and 321Free and SitePoint and HostedScripts.com and SiteGadgets and SubPortal and Dream Tools and CGISpy and Multicity (thanks, Andy.) - TONS of free things for your Web site, including Webmaster tools software, plus many, many services, including online forums, counters, mailing lists, polls, search engines, a daily cartoon, a member database, an events calendar, an e-commerce shopping cart, guest books, and more. Each service runs on the provider's server, and the only cost is that a banner ad appears with each service. I use Bravenet's daily cartoon and Web site referral service on my ComputerBob site.

MAILING LISTS - Coollist and Egroups offer free services that lets you create email mailing lists, to help the members of your group or organization keep in touch with each other. Here's how it works -- you set up a mailing list and invite people to join it by adding their email addresses to it. Then, you send an email message to the mailing list, and the mailing list automatically sends it to all of its current subscribers. You can also choose to allow other members to send messages to the mailing list. People can easily subscribe or unsubscribe from your mailing list at any time, without you having to do anything. I used Microsoft's ListBot to manage ComputerBob's Newsletter until Microsoft discontinued it and replaced it with a service that costs $149 per year. I haven't used a mailing list service since then.

News Ticker - This is the free JavaScript 24-hour news ticker that I used to have near the top of my ComputerBob home page. At this site, you can sign up to install it on your own Web site.

POLLS - Sparklit lets you add polls to your Web site. Sparklit is the best free poll provider I've found, and it's the one I use. You can easily create and administer your own online poll, with your choice of many different poll configurations, layouts, colors, fonts, and more. Immediately after you've created your poll, they show you the correct HTML code to copy and paste into your Web site to make your poll work. Another free poll provider is Votations, which I haven't tried, but which appears to have many powerful features.

RiddleNut - Add a free riddle area to your Web page by just copying and pasting a few lines of code. The riddle changes every time the page is reloaded.

SEARCH ENGINES - FreeFind - A free, customizable search engine that lets your visitors search for information within your Web site. The downside is that advertisements are displayed on the search results page. If you're willing to do some more work to get it set up, Atomz offers a much more powerful, much more customizable, free search engine with no banner ads, for Web sites of up to 500 pages. Atomz is the search engine that I used on this site for several years, until I installed my own search engine script on my Web server.

SCRIPTS and APPLETS - SourceForge has over 50,000 Open Source software development projects. Hotscripts.com has over 12,500 resources in over 1000 categories, including Java, JavaScripts, PHP, Perl, Flash, and many more. The PHP Resource Index has over 1500 PHP scripts, while its sister site, The CGI Resource has over 3500 CGI scripts. JavaScripts.com has several thousand free JavaScripts that you can customize and use on your Web site. Scripts include an email form, pop-up windows mouseover images and much, much more. About.com's Focus On JavaScript has many useful free JavaScripts and JavaScript tutorials. A1 JavaScripts has over 150 more free JavaScripts. JavaScript Source has hundreds of free JavaScripts and a free newsletter. The JavaFile has thousands of free JavaScripts and a free newsletter. DevHead has both JavaScripts and Java Applets. Zack's Archive has a bunch of free CGI and Perl scripts that you can add to your Web pages to create guest books, polls, self-grading quizzes, online forms, and more. CodeBrain and CodeBelly have free Java, JavaScript, and Perl scripts, plus a free newsletter.

Siglets - Add a free funny one-liner to your Web site by just copying and pasting a few lines of code. The one-liner changes every time the page is reloaded. For awhile before I created Graffiti, I used Siglets on my ComputerBob home page.

SITE PROMOTION AND E-COMMERCE TOOLS - AddMe has many site promotion and e-commerce tools, including a shopping cart program, search engine submission, a Meta tags generator, a weekly newsletter and more.

Stock Ticker - A free stock ticker that you can add to your Web site.