In the midst of building your website you should pause and consider if a chat room or a forum would suit what you intend to offer. If your business is service oriented, such as catering or a spa service, then you might want to consider a forum where cooking recipes can be exchanged or home-made micro spa treatments provided.

Of course not every website is suited for such add ons.

Before adding a forum or a chat room there are certain characteristics that you must consider in each one.

Chat Rooms: The most successful chat rooms are the ones that are opened all day regardless of the country the chatter is accessing from, this means that in most cases you will need to pay for a chat room robot, which, if you are creating a website in a free server, well, it is not practical. The other way is to have someone permanently connected to supervise the activity inside the room, and this is not feasible for matters of budget. So, if you decide to open a chat room, make sure that this is a theme specific and available at a certain schedule and weekday. If your business is fabric sales, then you can theme your chat room on sewing tips and projects and only those who are into that will enter, giving you an opportunity to advertise your business to your target market.

Forums: These are the ideal add ons for most of the web site builders. It’s a Bulletin Board that can be handled in two ways: Posted on real time (with no censorship) or Posted afterwards (with censorship). In both cases, the poster has to be registered with a functioning address and must be responsible of all the rules and regulations regarding the forum. Threads in the forum can be of many things, related or not to your business activity.

So do take the time, think it through and, if convenient, add one to your site.