Jump to the following topics:

1. Advantages and disadvantages.
2. Features of guestbooks.
3. Resources.  

Advantages and disadvantages.

1. Advantages.
   • We can gather some demographic information. We learn about the types of people who are visiting the site.
   • We can get feedback regarding our site and our goods or services.
   • We can make new contacts. When our visitors leave their email address and URL, we can contact them for follow-up, reciprocal links, etc.
   • We have another means of interactivity. Many internet users like to express themselves, and to do something at a website.
   • We build a sense of community. Our visitors meet one another, when they read the comments.
2. Disadvantages.
   • Guestbooks look unprofessional on some sites. Guestbooks are acceptable for personal websites, and for casual commercial sites
   • There can be undesirable messages. These messages might contain profanity, links to our competitors, or unfavorable comments about our products or services.
   • The email addresses can be harvested by our competitors.
   • The email addresses can be harvested by spammers. The spammers' "robots" troll websites, looking for email addresses.

Features of guestbooks.  

1. Price. Guestbooks are usually free.
2. Tech support. By phone or email. Quick responses? 24/7?
3. Ease of use. We need to be able to remove undesirable comments, and to change our graphics and questions.
4. Monitoring. Usually, a visitor's comment goes directly into the guestbook; we can remove an undesirable comment when we visit the guestbook later. Other guestbooks do not post the messages immediately; instead the messages go into storage so that we can read them before they go into the guestbook (and we can prevent the undesirable comments from being posted).
5. Customizing of the graphics. We might be able to choose the colors, icons, and fonts.
6. Customizing of the questions. Some guestbooks come with standard questions: name, email address, URL, and comments. Other guestbooks allow us to ask our own questions, e.g., "How did you find out about us?"
7. Notification. Some guestbooks will notify us by email when someone puts a new entry into the guestbook.
8. Profanity checking. Some guestbooks block "dirty words."

Resources.

1. Website-hosting services. Many of these services provide a guestbook at no additional cost.
2. Free guestbook services. These companies will host our guestbook on their server. The guestbook is free; to pay the expense, the company puts a banner onto the guestbook.
3. Software which we can install on our own server, or on our website host's server. There are CGI scripts for guestbooks.