Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 19. Keeping in Touch with Visitors

In This Chapter

Using autoresponders Distributing electronic newsletters Spreading the word about new content on your Web site Using form makers Ensuring privacy and security

When someone initially visits your site, you naturally want that person to keep coming back. One of the natural ways to do that is to keep in touch by letting visitors know what’s new and reminding them that you’re there. The problem is spam—no, not the canned meat — it’s Internet slang for unsolicited commercial e-mail. If you haven’t gotten plenty of it already, you probably don’t have an e-mail address at all. Get-rich-quick schemes, health products that make you live forever, and all sorts of other garbage zoom back and forth across the Net, clogging mailboxes and raising hackles.

So how do you keep in touch without spamming? The answer is simple: You send e-mail messages only to those visitors who request them. That way, everybody’s happy. You get to build up a following among your visitors, and they get to receive the information they ask for. This chapter presents tools that make it easy for your visitors to keep up with what’s going on at your site while keeping you out of the doghouse with your Web space provider.