One of the most daunting tasks for a neophyte Web designer, particularly a self-employed developer without a support team behind him or her, is adding interactive features to an otherwise static Web site project. I often chuckle at that IBM television commercial where the young designer is showing "the boss" an option of either a spinning logo, or a logo with flames, and the boss ventures that "wouldn't it be nice if the visitor could actually interact with the company in some way," to which the designer replies, "I don't know how to do that."

Most designers don't get too deep into the technical end, and companies usually break up tasks to different people so that the artist does art, the architect does HTML, and the programmer does the back-end coding. Of course, when you do it all yourself, you have to try to meet your client needs "in house" or outsource what you don't know how to do.

Thanks to a number of companies that have launched services in response to this need, anyone who can do HTML can now add powerful interactive features without knowing a bit about programming or script installation. And best of all, these "plug-in" features are free.

Defining Interactivity
Essentially, interactivity on a Web site is defined as anything that is more than a simple hypertext link and responds to some kind of input by the site visitor. This includes inquiry forms, chat rooms, free E-mail, search engines, and anything that can take information or queries from a visitor and then do something with it.

Most of us who develop Web sites for a living, have typically added this type of interactivity via a server-side script of some kind. A form on a Web site would send data to a script, then the script would do something like print search results to the browser screen on a new page. For a chat room, a script and various management passwords and admin-users would need to be created, and custom pages would need to be built to make the chat room look like it was part of the rest of the site design. All of this takes time, knowledge of server script installation, security levels, server paths, and configuration files.

With these new interactive service providers, it has become simple to add everything from message boards to language translation, rather than build it from scratch (or buy it from a script publisher). These interactive services allow you to provide your clients (and yourself) with a wealth of "sticky" site content without learning the "hard stuff."

The Searchers
One of the most popular, and most useful, additions to any Web site with more than a dozen pages is a search engine. This can be useful for visitors who want to find a specific piece of information without navigating through your site links. Further, it's an effective replacement for an old-fashioned "site map."

To address this need, a company called Atomz.com offers a simple plug-in search product that provides you a bit of code you put on your Web page(s). When somebody enters a search term, it connects to the Atomz.com server and spits out a page of search results with links to the relevant content on your site. The plug-in is easy to set-up from an account manager tool, and you can have everything working in under an hour. From the account manager on the Atomz.com site you can specify how often you want your site spidered (to find new content you add), you can customize the look and feel of search results (either generic or to match your site design), and you can view reports on the most searched terms and how often the site was searched by visitors. You also receive a weekly E-mail containing a summary of your reports.

What's remarkable about this new service is that the search results don't contain third-party advertising (as of this writing), although it does contain a "powered by Atomz.com" logo. Obviously a lot of Web site managers/developers think this is a cool feature because, according to Atomz.com CEO and Co-Founder Steve Kusmer, over 27,000 sites are using the service so far. This includes Hewlett -Packard's developer site, the Al Gore for President campaign, O'Reilly & Associates, and Price Waterhouse Coopers. Since adding this feature to several of my sites it has worked flawlessly, and I'm now recommending it to my clients who can't afford a dedicated server-side search solution. For the Send2Press.com project, I mixed methods: I use a local search tool to search only press release archives, then use Atomz to provide searches of the entire site from the homepage.