Could you possibly want any more? (bravenet.com)

Member Name: theanarchistkid

Product:	bravenet.com
Date:	25/02/01 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's Free!

Disadvantages: It's Slow!

Bravenet is a service which offers a seemingly massive array of options for webmasters and site designers. A lot of these facilities can be found by themselves on other services but it's great to have the option of them all in one place.

The Bravenet hompage is normally very quick and speedy which makes a nice change. All of the options are directly on the page so it is easy to see what facilities they offer and what facilities are right for you. There are big banner adverts everywhere though which gives an indication of how they are funded. These banner ads tend to crop up a lot throughout the service, but because it's free I think that this can only be expected.

Registration is 100% free so obviously value for money is excellent. The only downfall to this is that if you register for a guestbook for example, they stick another little link next to it which links back to the Bravenet site. Also if you register for a forum with them, there is banner advertising on it, which whilst not fatal, can be quite annoying occasionally. One aspect of the service which is occasionally frustrating is that the servers are often pretty sluggish. This is mainly due to the fact that Bravenet are so popular so the demand for their server time must be huge. If you want to have high speed guestbooks and the like you might be better off writing a script for one yourself.

So then, what services do they actually offer?

Message Forum - This is essentially what used to be known as a bulletin board and is a pretty good example of one. The main advantage of Bravenet forums over their competitors is the amount of customisation that they allow. You could completely change the colour scheme, change the picutres that are used and even block swear words. For a free service this is excellent and although it's not as attractive as a scripted message board such as Ikonboard (www.ikonboard.com) it is much easier to set up and maintain.

Hit Count
er - This is a little graphic that you put on the main page of your website and it counts the visitors. Most sites have them now and it is useful for yourself to guage the popularity of your site and it also allows you to show off to your visitors about how many visitors you have. There are a multitude of styles to choose from so if you find out that one style clashes with your colour scheme, you can easily change it. The incorporate the hit counter into your page all you have to do is paste some HTML code into your site and then it's up and running. You can choose whether or not you want your visitors to be able to see how many hits you've had and also you can choose what number the counter starts at. A useful facility is that you can make sure that the counter doesn't count your own visits to the site so it gives a more accurate reflection on the popularity.

Fast URL - Fast URLs are for people that don't want to go to the hassle of registering domain names. There's nothing inherently wrong with them, but if you are designing a website for a company it's probably worth while registering a domain name instead because it looks much more professional. Unfortunately the Bravenet fast URLs aren't very good because they are things such as clik.to/yourURL which is a bit tacky. They do have the advantage of being easy to remember but as I said they don't look as professional as a domain.

Guestbook - A lot of sites have guestbooks these days and they are, as their name would suggest, a place where visitors to your site can fill in a form and let you know what they think of your site. If you have a site like mine you may have problems with abusive language within the guestbook but it is possible to block certain words. The Bravent implementation of a guestbook is pretty good although at busy times it either doesn't work at all or is very slow. You have to put a link on your site to it, but it is pretty discreet so it does
n't take over.

Mini-Poll - This allows you to have a poll on your website. Generally these polls are never taken too seriously so don't try and take anything too deep and meaningful from the results. They are however a bit of interactive fun for your visitors and something that may make them want to return to your site at a later date. As a webmaster this is the toughest part of the whole process, getting visitors to return. If you do offer interactive content such as a forum or a poll it is much more likely that they will come back.

Live Chat Room - I have never used a Bravenet chat room because in my experience of them they are slow and ugly. Also the problem is that if your site isn't very popular there will never be anyone chatting on it so there's no point of having the chat room in the first place. I would only reccommend having a chat room if you are confident that you will be getting hundreds of visitors to your site at any one time.

Email forms - This is a simple solution to a quite complex problem. They allow visitors to your site to give feedback to you about it, simply and easily. The problem with forms normally is that they have to have some kind of script running in the background to email the results to you. The Bravenet service takes the script responsibility though so you don't have to worry about it.

Mailing list - This allows people to sign up to the mailing list of your website. This means that you can send them information on updates and other useful information. Some people tend to use them to send monthly newsletters with, which is a very good idea. The only problem with mailing lists is the fact that it's only very rarely that people sign up to them because they are afraid of getting spam. Only get a mailing list if you are certain that people will sign up to it, or else there's no point in going to all that effort.

Other facilities that Bravenet offer include : web ring
s, greeting cards, classified ads, cartoon of the day and news headlines.
These services are nowhere near as good and they all have the feeling of a novelty service. I'm sure that some people must have a use for them but I certainly don't and I wouldn't reccommend that you implement them just for the sake of it.

The Bravenet site itself is very simple to use. The annoying thing is though that you have to register to use each service, rather than registering once and then being able to use all the services. This isn't a major problem but it is a little bit annoying. Ease of use is very good throughout the site and even an absolute beginner should be able to cope with just about anything on the site.

Bravenet offer a whole host of facilities but the problem is that they excel in very few of them. In my opinion, they would have been better off focusing on the speed of their servers and improving the services that they already have instead of trying to introduce loads of novelty features. I would still reccommend Bravenet though because they are free and easy to use. Just don't be tempted to use all the services on one page because it will probably look horrible!

Summary: