Some people may want to add other goodies and freebies to their pages.  They are nice extras, but are certainly not essential to a basic academic web page.  If you wish to get spritzy, try some of these: Chat Rooms Chat rooms allow real-time conversation.  I use mine for "virtual office hours." My personal favorite is Parachat - you register at the Parachat site, they send you five lines of HTML code to paste into your page and voilà - you have your own chat room.  It is VERY easy to do.  You may want to look at some of the others as well.   Parachat View one here Scholar Chat Network View one here Chat Planet View one here BeSeen View one here French Kiss View one here Threaded Discussion Groups Threaded discussion groups are great for upper-level lit classes, or just for maintaining a class bulletin board.  This is one of the biggest requests I get -- how do you do it?  The answer, quite simply, is:  I don't.  I let someone else do all the work and then I come off looking like a techie genius!!  See what I mean by checking these out:   Your BBS View one here Inside the Web View one here BeSeen View one here Assembly View one here Counters Counters can prove very useful in tracking who is visiting your web site.   The counters listed below are all freebies.  My personal favorite is WebTracker because of the statistical reporting available.  You can have a simple counter (which merely records the number of visitors to your site), a tracker, which counts visitors and tracks where they came from, what platform they use, what browser they use, and lots more.  Or, there are combination counter/trackers which do both.   WebTracker View One here Extensive list of counters and trackers       This page was created by Pat Pecoy. Last updated Nov. 13, 1998