Whether you own an e-commerce site or a blog, creating a loyal community around your website is important.  You need to encourage your site’s visitors to participate, to interact with you and with each other. WebbyChat is a neat little service that lets you set up and control chat rooms for your website. You need a little bit of technical know-how to use it, but not much. All you have to do is cut and paste a few lines of code onto your web page.

Of course, sometimes visitor interactions can become less than pleasant.  WebbyChat’s free chat rooms are a little bit like the Wild West-it’s every man for himself out there! However, their paid plans offer a variety of control features to help you keep your chat room troll-free, including automatic explicit language filters, the ability to give trolls the boot or ban them for life, and a feature called “Silent Insanity” (is it just me, or does that sound like a D & D spell?) that basically puts them on mute without them realizing it. If a room gets out of hand, you can also “freeze” it, so that only moderators can talk.

Other nifty features include the ability to ring a bell to get your visitors attention, to spy on them as they travel through your site, and to send everyone in the chat room a message at the same time using the “Message of the Day” feature.

The user interface is attractive and easy to use, and everything seemed to be working wonderfully when I tried out the demo on the website. The “entryway” to the chat room sits as a tab on the side of your web page. Visitors who want to chat can click the tab to make the room slide out. I liked how unobtrusive it was, especially compared to the pop-up chat windows that some sites use.

There are plenty of sites out there that offer easy-to-install chat rooms for websites, but WebbyChat does stand out for the range of features that it offers. WebbyChat could be quite useful for anyone who wants to provide online customer service, talk to their customers directly to learn more about them, or just to build a sense of community around their website.  Bonus points for naming a feature “Silent Insanity,” too!

What do you think of WebbyChat? Would these chat rooms be a useful feature on your web site?

Our Rating of WebbyChat

Tags: Communication

Categories:web