Be my guest

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1998 by Mike Espindle

Your Web site is up and running, but are you interacting with visitors? Adding something as simple as a guest book--an area where users can sign in and volunteer comments and suggestions for your site--gives you a way to offer an entertaining, interactive feature that not only racks up hits, but helps you collect valuable market data and sales leads.

Jack Leigh, a photographer in Savannah, Ga., whose work graced the recent bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, couldn't agree more. His Southern Images Gallery site (www.nuovo.com/southern-images) includes a simple guest-book feature. "Because of the interest in the book, the movie, Savannah in general, and my cover image, we're getting a tremendous response to the site," Leigh says. "And the guest book is a way to gauge the interest of people. We get a lot of comments from the gallery and museum community and many inquiries for prints."

When users decide to join the fun and sign your guest book, you'll suddenly have names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers (or anything else you include in your registry form) to associate with the nameless, faceless surfers that find their way to your site. Even if all a guest book does is allow visitors to drop you a line to tell you how cool they think your site is, you can collect information to take the relationship further. And if you're lucky, your guest book comments may be so inventive, or even funny, that you'll also have an endless supply of constantly updated content that other users can browse through to check out who visited your site and what they had to say.

"Sometimes a guest book is the most entertaining part of a site," says Heide Praver, a senior producer for the Web design firm Visual Radio in New York. "People often get hooked just following the messages, and the more hooked they get, the more likely it is that they'll decide to go ahead and sign in themselves."

Checking In Getting visitors to sign in is the goal of having a guest book--especially since you can ask your visitors for specific information in addition to their general comments. The most important decision you need to make when you implement a guest book for your site is picking exactly what information you want from users before they post a comment or ask a question.

Looking to expand your e-mail promotion list? Require visitors to give you their address before they post a message. Want to know how your new classified ad is doing? Ask them to type in where they heard about your business. Care to find out which search engines your market uses? Query guest book signers for the engines they frequent most.

But be courteous of your visitors' time. "I made the mistake of asking way too many questions on my guest book when I started out," says Kimberley Huggins, an image consultant in Springfield, Va. Her Image Advantage site (www.va.net/beautictrl) features a guest book that asks users to indicate if they want her to contact them with information as well as requests for key demographics. "I went through the process of weeding it down to just the vital information--about 10 to 15 questions. I needed to pre-qualify any leads and make it as easy as I could for people who were genuinely interested to contact me."

Your second objective is to make it as painless as possible for visitors to add themselves to your book. Net users are getting savvier, and they'll shy away if you've made it too obvious that you're not nearly as interested in creating a fun, interactive bulletin board as you are in getting their e-mail addresses so you can spam them later with promotional e-mail.

Leigh, for instance, sorts through visitor comments each week or so and, depending on the level of interest, follows up on leads to print orders via email or fax.

An Open-Book Policy Setting up a guest book yourself can be tricky if you don't know CGI scripting. Fortunately, there are services to help you set one up. Take Leigh, a devout non-techie. He worked in partnership with his Internet service provider to develop the site and guest book on a revenue-sharing basis.

Like Leigh, your ISP should also be your first stop. Most have libraries of scripts for common CGI functions like guest books. If your carrier doesn't offer CGI-based guest books, you can also opt for any number of free, off-the-shelf hosting services, such as GuestWorld (www.guestworld.com) or DreamBook (www.dreambook.com). Simply go to one of these sites, follow the instructions, mount the templates, and your host's server will do all the CGI work, data capture, and reporting. Your Web site just serves as a front end. The downside: You're stuck with your host company's interface, which usually only asks for a name and e-mail address in addition to general comments. The hosting service will also have access to the data your guest book collects. But, if you're willing to share the wealth, these services can make a lot of sense for home-based operators with limited programming know-how and time.

On the other hand, if your head doesn't spin at the thought of learning a new computer language, check out the free PERL script libraries at www.perl.com. Image Advantage's Huggins opted to develop her own guest book. "I initially launched the site with a forum to generate leads, but I was dissatisfied with the response," she says. "I actually taught myself programming by looking at the source code for other sites and practicing so I could structure a guest book that met my business needs. It's worked very well for me so far, with about 10 visitors signing the guest book each day--and from as far as Singapore and India."