Guest Books are a puzzle. People seem to love them. Almost every newbie webmaster puts a guest book on his or her website first thing. Few if any of the more mature websites have a guest book. I suspect that this is either a result of user abuse of a guest book, or maybe they've just become too cool to have a guest book.

Who knows? They are fun for many and no one can dispute the fact that they adorn many websites.

Why heck darn we even have one right here on DomainDecorator.com

View our guest book
Sign our guest book

There are several ways in which a domain decorator can put a guest book on a website:

• The guest book comes as a part of the web hosting.
• Install a perl script to run the guest book.
• You may use a service such as Lycos' GuestGear

Having a guest book as part of your webhosting arrangement is obviously the easiest.

Install a guest book script is not harder than installing any other script. In fact it is probably one of the easiest scripts to install. Unfortunately ALL perl scripts can be tricky for the do-it-yourselfer to install.

Using a service such as the GuestGear from Lycos could be an easy third option. But you should be warned. Lycos is spending the money, time, bandwidth, and support dollars to provide this service because they are getting something out of it. Fair trade. You get intangled in their commerce web and they give you a free quest book. You let every browser who comes to your website sign a guest book branded with Lycos -- thus furthering the name in the awareness of the world. This can be a good deal. Just repeat to yourself while signing up "There is no gold watch for a dollar, There is no free lunch." We're not saying don't use the service. It looks good and god only knows that installing a script yourself can lead to mental breakdowns for the uninitiated. Just use common sense and never sell anything you wouldn't give away.  

Wnki users click the image to right for instructions. #insertguestbook#