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If you already have a website and are not sure what to do next, this part of the site is for you.
You have several goals at this stage: to increase traffic to your website and to provide an evolving
content so that your visitors will come back. Furthermore, you may want to enhance your pages by
adding a hit counter, a guestbook and statistically informative tools like trackers. (Depending on
where your website is hosted you may not be able to add all of these features.)
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Increase traffic
Make sure that your website is listed with the web directories and search engines. To register
your site with search engines, simply point your browser to the one you want and submit your URL
and information (there is usually a link from the main page, often at the bottom).
In order for a user to find your website when doing searches, it is helpful to use something
called a meta tag in your HTML. Meta tags list a description of your website and keywords that
a search engine can use to reference your pages. Properly designed sites will have extensive
keyword lists. Meta tags are placed between the <head> </head> tags at the beginning of the
HTML for that page.
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Directories and Search Engines
Yahoo!
GreekZone
GreekPages
GreekSpot
dmoz Open Directory Project
Altavista
Excite
Hotbot
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Update your content
A simple way to ensure repeat traffic to your website is to provide updated information as often
as possible. If you are provided event dates for your chapter activities, monthly updates on
chapter accomplishments, semester updates for Rush dates, your chances of getting repeat visitors
(alumnae, potential rushees, family members) are higher. Some chapters have pictures of their
members on their websites. More and more are listing officers names and providing email links.
These features make your website interesting to visit!
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JavaScript Features
 You can add
some advanced features to your site by using JavaScript. This will create messages in the status
window, allow some mouseover image changes and other visual additions often referred to on the web
as "eye candy".
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Hit Counters
To record the activity at your website, you can incorporate a hit counter. Each time someone visits
your website, a counter will record it and display the new number. You may have been sites that state
"this website has been visited ### times". This tool is free from many sources on the web but may
involve advanced scripting in some cases. If you are using a free service such as
GeoCities, hit counters are very simple to use.
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Guestbooks
Free guestbooks are simple to set up and enable your visitors to leave comments to you. Geocities
users can choose to use the free guestbooks provided with their memberships. There are also many
other free guestbooks which are fairly simple to add to your website.
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Guestbooks
GuestWorld
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Trackers
Trackers are a little more advanced. These can tell you how often your website get visited, like a hit
counter does. The additional features of trackers is that they will tell you when your site was visited
if you want to record the busiest time of day for traffic on your site, the busiest day of the week or
other statistics. Some trackers will provide the URL of the reffering site as well. Depending on which
features you want, trackers may require monthly charges. Investigate the potential of the free trackers
before assuming that you must buy a tracker service for your Alpha Gam chapter website.
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