How to Make My Own Chat Room Site
Put chat functionality on your website or blog to create a chat room site that your visitors and friends can use to connect with each other. Take advantage of the many free online chat utilities to get started quickly and upgrade to a more powerful paid version to add advanced features to your chat room. Give your website visitors a richer online experience to create community and increase your website's popularity and traffic.
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Instructions
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Determine Your Chat Website Format
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Explore the topic or purpose for the chat room on your website or blog. Choose one that will interest your visitors and encourage conversation, stimulate ideas and invite participation. Focus on a hobby or skill you have, such as music or sports. Consider other popular conversational themes, such as dating, school, work or recreation. The closer the topic is to your area of interest, the more involved you'll be in your online chat room.
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Design your website or blog to feature your free online chat if you're starting from scratch. You can use one of the many free or low-cost website packages furnished by your hosting provider, a web-based blog platform, such as Blogger or Wordpress or develop a more complex website using your web development skills. Add a chat page to your existing website or blog to supplement its content and add visitor interactivity around your theme or topic.
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Make your website's homepage an invitation to visitors to engage in discussion on your topic after you've chosen an online chat platform. Think of it as welcoming guests to a party you're having. Remember the goal is to have friendly and useful conversations that interest as many participants as possible, so stress decorum and politeness in your invitation to participate in chatting. Encourage this so your visitors will want to come back to chat more.
Choose Your Chat Platform
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Add free online chat to a webpage or blog post quickly by using a link to a chat service such as Yaplet to get started easily. Embed the chat service's HTML into your webpage code to present a chat window, or use the graphic link that some supply. Others offer a pop-up graphic link, and if you use that on a social networking site such as MySpace, you'll want to be sure pop-ups are allowed.
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Create your own chat room theme or use a ready-made one offered by many services, such as 99chats. Customize your chat theme to personalize it and make it visually relevant to your topic. Use the free chat room hosting that many services offer, as well.
Start a spontaneous chat by using the Quick Chat feature of the Chatzy chat service. You'll be limited to the keeping the title and subject you started the chat with, and have no password functionality.
Use Chatzy's Virtual Room option to set permissions, define user access, create your own custom welcome message and change the chat title and subject at any time during the conversation.
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Subscribe to a professional chat room service, such as addonChat, to have more advanced features for your users to chat online. Tailor your chat room experience precisely with powerful room design tools, such as customizable logos, buttons, icons and fonts. Give your online chat visitors greater control with user typing indicators, chat transcription, audio notifications, avatars and other features. Choose from the level of service that gives the utilities you need and advance to higher software editions as your chat audience grows.
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Be aware of your duties as chat room operator to monitor the conversation as much as possible for offensive language, impersonation, link spamming and any legal violations, such as threats of violence or implications of predatory behavior.
Make it clear to your visitors that your online chat room is a place for safe and open discussion and that no abuse of it will be allowed.
Note any violators and ban them from participating in your chat room. Remember that a tarnished reputation among your visitors will leave you to chat alone.
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Tips & Warnings
Promote your free online chat room on social networking sites to bring visitors and participants to it.
Explore new video chat technologies to add a visual dimension to your chat room
Watch for phishing, spoofing and attempts to entice personal or identification information by any chat participants from others when you're moderating your chat room conversations.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit laptop 9 image by Harvey Hudson from Fotolia.com
