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Planning Your Upgrades

When it comes time to beef up your site's features, you can find lots of free or inexpensive Web site additions on the Net. And getting them on your site often involves little more than pasting some code into one of your pages. Here's a quick look at some of the better add-ons we came across.

Looking to track how many people have visited your site? Microsoft's BCentral offers the free FastCounter, which tracks the number of visitors to your site. BCentral also provides soup-to-nuts Web services for small businesses, including domain-name registration, e-mail, Web hosting, and Web site templates, for prices starting at $30 per month.

A quick and easy way to engage your visitors is to poll them. Votations.com and Create a Poll let you create custom polls for free, the former with as many as 50 answers and the latter with a limit of 20. You can include linked images and customizable form fields in Votations.com's polls; Create a Poll gives plenty of options for formatting results.

We used a couple of JavaScript applets to add interactivity to our demonstration site. Two sites--JavaScripts.com and 24fun.com--have great selections of free, customizable scripts for download. Another site, called HostedScripts.com, offers free CGI scripts that allow you to add features such as message boards, mailing lists, and password protection so you can limit access to your site to registered users.

Speaking of message boards, Nexus Web Development offers a free message board, among other free site components. Creating your message board is quick and simple, and you're even offered rudimentary design choices, but you'll have to abide banner ads on some of the message board pages.

The board on our demonstration site is Server.com's DiscussionApp 4, which stores as many as 2000 messages and is easy to set up and customize. Server.com also offers free mailing-list, calendar, and guestbook applications.

Finally, Atomz.com's Express Search is a powerful hosted search engine that's free for sites containing fewer than 500 pages. You can customize the appearance of your search-results page, and you can generate reports on the terms that visitors to your site are searching for.

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