Free Chat Rooms and Discussion Forums
Another excellent tool for keeping people returning to your site is a chat function. Live chat rooms allow your visitors to chat in "real time" with other visitors about things they have in common - hopefully something to do with the theme of your site! Aim for a service that gives good "branding" to your chat area. If you can display your logo, customize the colors to match yours, users will feel they are still using your site.
If you set up web site at a free hosting service, then the preferred solution is to use a service which hosts the chat rooms on their servers. People still have to visit your site to start, but the bandwidth is transferred to the chat host's servers. This is a good thing since chat rooms require lots of processing resources and may strain the patience of your free web site provider - in fact, many free hosting services will not let you run chat rooms directly on their servers.
Essentially discussion forums run like bulletin boards, where someone's comments are pinned up for everybody else to see and comment on if they wish. Usually the comments only stay up for a certain period of time (days or weeks) before they come down. You can set up these discussion forums to give you different levels of control over the content and people's behaviour- from anything goes, to nothing gets posted until you approve it. Most services also allow you to set up different "threads" or topics for discussion.
The down side of having chat rooms & discussions forums is that some people may become abusive or bully others. Not only can this drive visitors away from your chat rooms, but it may leave them with such a bad taste in their mouths that they don't even come back to the rest of your site again. The only real solution is to have someone monitor the chat room conversations if this is a concern for you - but some chat services can have content filters to block out the worst. However, you may find that a bulletin board style of discussion forum is a better option instead of chat rooms.
You can get free chat rooms & discussion forums at:
