A plain site with no interactivity doesn’t get many repeat visitors. One of the easiest ways to keep them coming back is by adding a forum. You could use it to give support to your users about your product or just talk about random stuff. Other sites use polls or surveys to add interactivity. The way you choose to interact with your users is up to you, but the results speak for themselves. Interactivity equals more visitors.

Forums

MyBB

I have to admit the first one on my list is one I’m a little biased about. MyBB is a forum package I was a part of since before version 1 came out. I made one of the original themes for the forum that became the official theme. The theme, of course, evolved over time into what it is today. I was a member of their support forums until about a year ago. MyBB Has features that give paid forum packages like vBulletin and IPB a run for their money. Since you need to host it yourself it’s a little advanced for the casual user, but it isn’t too complicated.

ImperialBB

IBB is another forum that is run by some friends of mine. This forum has some unique features that make it a little easier to run for novices. It has a one click upgrade feature so you don’t need to do too much work to upgrade.

Vanilla

Vanilla is a forum I really love. It’s minimalist compaired to the above two. You get basic functionality and you add features via addons. Vanilla will also host your forums for you..

Other sites

• ZetaBoards
• Bravenet

Polls/Surveys

Polldaddy

Polldaddy allows you to put together a quick and easy poll or survey for your site. They offer nice graphs for the results too.

99polls

99polls allows you to create polls for your website or social network site.

Photo Galleries

Gallery 2

Gallery 2 is probably one of the best known photo albums for the web, right behind Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. It’s easy to set up and use.

Sites with multiple addons

Bravenet

Bravenet has been around for at least 10 years. They offer lots of hosted tools like Forums, guest books, photo albums, etc.

Silk Icons by Famfamfam – One of the most popular icon sets on the net today. It’s also one of my favorites. I see them on quite a few websites these days. It contains 1,022 16×16 pixel icons.

Silk Companion 1 By Damieng – Inspired by the work of Mark James (Famfamfam), these 460+ 16×16 pixel icons are a perfect fit with the original Silk Icons.

Flag Icons by Famfamfam – If you need flags for some project, this is the perfect icon set. All 247 flags are 16×16 pixels.

Diagona Icons By Pinvoke – 400 more icons in a similar style to the Silk Icons above in both 10×10 and 16×16 pixel sizes.

Onebit free icon set #1 and Onebit free icon set #2 By IcoJoy – A total of 80 pretty useful 48×48 pixel icons.

Basic Set Icons By PixelMixer – Here are 42 more high quality Icons in 4 different sizes. They come in 16×16, 32×32, 48×48 and 64×64 pixel sizes. A link back to the creators web site is required if you use them.

One question asked by people new to making websites always is, ‘Where can I find pictures to use on my website?’ Many people point people to stock photo sites that cost money either per picture or per membership. Often lots of them require a royalty fee as well.

There is some good news! There are several that actually offer free pictures you can use. There are even some that offer pictures that are royalty free.

Always check the terms of use and the licenses for the picture you choose to use. Sometimes you may be required to link back to the site in exchange for using the picture.

• Every Stock Photo
  This one isn’t my favorite site on the list, but I put it first because it is a stock photo search engine. They claim over 4 million pictures in their database. When searching you can specify license type.
• Stock.XCHNG
  My personal favorite of the bunch. I’ve used it for years. They have an excellent search and a large selection of pictures. If you are a photographer, you can even upload your own pictures for other people to use. They claim 350,000 images by 30,000 photographers.
• MorgueFile
  Despite the name, this site is a very good source of pictures. A morguefile is a term used my illustrators and newspapers to refer to their picture stockpiles. They have many categories of pictures. As with most of the sites on this list, photographers can upload their own pictures.
• DesignPacks
  This site has multiple picture packs consisting of 15 pictures on a particular subject such as flowers, cars, or tools. Some of the pictures are pretty abstract, but they would have a use for headers or the like.
• StockVault
  This site has quite a few Photoshop tutorials in addition to thousands of pictures. Registration isn’t required for this site, but it does give you additional features. You don’t need to register to download pictures.
• ImageBase
  The pictures here are licensed by a Creative Commons License. The pictures come in very high resolutions. Many different pictures across many categories.

This tutorial assumes that you know how to uncompress a .zip file. We wont cover that in this tutorial.

You also need an HTML editor for this tutorial. There are two types of editors. WYSIWYG editors, which you would edit HTML in a word processor like environment, are very popular. Another style is the text editor style, where you edit HTML like you would a text document.

I’m going to use KompoZer for this tutorial because it is probably the easiest way for a beginner to edit a template. KompoZer is a 100% free and open source WYSIWYG editor. These steps will work with any editor.

Before you start, think about the pages you want to access from any page. I’m going to use Home, Products, Services, About, and Contact.

The steps we are going to take:

1. Create the navigation links
2. Use the template file to create the rest of the pages
3. Edit the content
4. Test the navigation to make sure it works

Step I: The template I chose already had those pages listed in the navigation. Go ahead and list the pages you want accessible from every page. Now we’ll make a link to the pages using a one-word name followed by .html. For example, About Us would become about.html and Contact Us would become contact.html. Right click the page name and go to link properties. For the Home link I’ll put index.html because that’s the default file a webserver loads when you go to a website. For the rest of the pages just enter your desired name for the page followed by .html. It’s important to make sure the link is lowercase. Save the file and proceed to the next step.

Step II:The next step is pretty easy. We’re now going to make a copy of the template file to make the other pages of the site. The easiest way to do that is right-click the index.html file and select copy. Then right-click a blank space in the folder and select paste. That will create a copy of index.html named Copy of index.html. Just rename that file to the second page of the site. We already have index.html which is the homepage. Now repeat that step for the rest of the pages.

Step III: The next step is also very easy. Go ahead and enter all the content across all the pages. There are lots of places to get pictures for you to use on your site. Sites like Stock.XCHNG and morguefile have very good free photos you can use on our site without paying royalty fees.

Step IV: We’re at the last step. Now we want to test the navigation and make sure it all works. Just open index.html up in your favorite browser and click all the links in the navigation.

We’re done! Congratulations, you now have your very own website. Now all you need to do is upload it to your webserver so people can access it.

I’m even exploring video tutorials. Those could be interesting to add to the site.