Summersault Blog

Creating an engaging website that keeps your users coming back over time can be an exciting challenge. One way to take on the challenge is to add a feature that encourages real-time human connection: a live chat room. Assuming that meeting in person isn’t possible or logistically easy, a chat room on your website can help bring your community of users together, allows you to be more efficient in your conversations, and creates a sense of freshness and relevance on the site itself.

This weblog entry will help you get a chat room installed on your site for free. Getting a feel for how to best manage a chat room once it is up and running…well, that’s a weblog entry for another day.

There are three main technical approaches to putting a chat room on your website:

1. Direct your users to a third-party service that hosts the chat room.
2. Use a third-party service that hosts that chat room, but it appears on your site alongside the rest of your content.
3. Use software that allows the chat room to actually reside on your site.

The options here range from “easiest to setup” to “harder to setup,” but at the same time they also range from “least amount of customization possible” to “most customization possible,” so you’ll have to decide what trade-offs you want to make when it comes to giving up control and customization in the name of convenience. But, once you’ve done that, your only other real decision will be what to call this new chat room.

Sending Users to a Third Party Service

With this option, your basically deciding as a group of users that your chat experience will happen somewhere else on the Internet. That’s a fine way to do it, as long as you all know where to go. Note that I’m talking about something a little different than, say, having everyone join in the same AOL Instant Messaging Chat, or the same Yahoo! Messenger Chat. These options could also work fine, but generally require everyone to have some particular software installed on their desktop computer, as opposed to just visiting a website and using an interface there.

There are too many web-based chat services to list here, but some well-known ones include Google Talk, WireClub, and Online Institute’s service, which (according to them) is used by physicians and lawyers. If you’re creating a chat for a distributed business or organization where some other collaboration tools might be helpful, Skrbl is a great choice for shared whiteboarding (but it doesn’t have a dedicated chat feature, so you’ll want to use it to complement something else). Adobe Connect is an even more comprehensive hosted solution for enterprise use.

The key is to find a service that has the kind of chat room interface you’re looking for, not too much advertising surrounding it (most services are advertiser-supported), and seems stable enough to be around for awhile. Also make sure that you’re not signing up with a chat service that is focused on “singles” or “dating” chat (unless that’s what your site is about), as they will tend to have a different approach to facilitating and promoting the chat rooms than you might want.

Using a Third-Party Service On Your Site

This option is very similar to the one above, in that you’ll still be depending on a third-party service to provide your chat functionality. The difference is that the chat will appear on your website, and so it’s more integrated into the overall experience you’re trying to create for your users. For some sites, this isn’t a big deal, but for others, it’s a critical part of the brand they offer.

There are again lots of chat services that will let you add their chat room system to your site, but here are a few to look at: Everywherechat.com, FreeJavaChat.com, ParaChat, and others.

Again, find one that offers you enough customization to suit your needs, and won’t overwhelm your users with too many interface options. You probably want to find a service that uses Flash-based chat rooms, as anything that requires ActiveX or other browser-specific technologies will not be compatible with all of your visitors` systems. You should also make sure to read the terms of use and privacy policies that go along with the services, so you know how they’ll record or use your chat information, and whether or not advertising will be included anywhere in the interface on your site.

Installing Your Own Chat Software

Installing your own chat software on your site means just that: you’ll find a software package that you like and upload it to the hosting account that your site uses. Of course, you’ll want to make sure that your hosting provider supports whatever software package you choose.

For the chat rooms I’ve created, including one called Live-Richmond.com for local residents in Richmond and Wayne County to talk about local issues, I’ve had great experiences with the free Java-based program PJIRC. It’s open source, so there are always a group of people working to make it better and more feature-rich, and…it’s free. It uses the IRC chat system to run a chat room, which is one of the most time-tested and popular ways to chat on the Internet. You can install it as a standalone feature on your site, or you can add it in to other popular community software you might be running, e.g. a phpBB discussion forum add-on or a module for the Drupal content management system.

Getting PJIRC up and running does require some configuration and some familiarity with IRC, but there is lots of documentation available to help out.

Final Thoughts

I hope this has been a helpful overview of what’s involved in adding chat functionality to your online presence. It really is a great way to bring people together when they might otherwise be having a hard time engaging each other, and certainly when physical distance is a limiting factor.

There are also many improvements to be made in the world of online chatting. For one, the lack of a standard means that there are so many ways to approach chatting online (video conferencing, too) that people generally seem to remain confused about what a good way might be. Also, a lot of the options I linked to above don’t take into consideration things like accessibility issues for visitors using text-only web browsing software, making the chat rooms much more difficult to participate in. Hopefully all of these issues will be addressed in time.

If you’re interested in adding a live chat feature to your website and need some assistance, we would be happy to help you with that, just get in touch. After all, online chatting falls right into our mission around building community on the Internet, and we’d love to help you put it to work for your organization.

---

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.