How to Create a Bravenet Guestbook for Your Website

Guestbooks are very common additions to most websites on the internet. A guestbook allows your website visitors to leave you their comments, ideas and thoughts about you, your site or a product you may be advertising. You can use a guestbook on your company website, your personal website or any site at all that you would want to allow people to comment on. One of the most commonly used guestbook hosting websites is www.Bravenet.com. I’ve used Bravenet for several different types of guestbooks, including on my very own website. Here are some tips on how to create a Bravenet guestbook on your website.

1) Sign up for an account. If you don’t already have a Bravenet account then now is the time to open one. Bravenet is free to use so all you have to do is follow the sign-up process, starting in the upper right-hand corner of the Bravenet homepage. Click on the “Join Bravenet” link to begin. On the next page you will need to input a username, your real name and an email address. Bravenet will then send you a temproary password to the email address that you provided. Once that password arrives in your email box you will be able to log into your Bravenet account and change the password to one that you would prefer.

2) Time to get started. After you have logged into your account it is time to get started on your guestbook. Click on the tab at the top of the page called “Web Tools”. Once the “web tools” page fully loads you will see a list of all the web tools available on Bravenet for you to use. Scroll down until you see the “Guestbook” link; it’s the fourth link down on the first column on the left. Click the “guestbook” link and wait for that page to load.

3) Now it’s time to create and customize your Bravenet guestbook. From this page you can view a guestbook demo or just jump rith into creating your own guestbook. Click on the big button on the right that says “Get Your Guestbook”. From this new page you will be able to choose if you would like a free Bravenet guestbook or a “Professional” guestbook. You will have to pay a fee for the professional version because it is ad-free. I’ve always gone with the free version because the ads aren’t any worse than other ads you find on the internet. Chose the type of guestbook hosting that you would prefer and click continue.

4) Next. After passing the “free rewards” page (advertisements) you will arrive at the HTML page for your guestbook. These are codes for you to copy and paste on your website, but this is before you’ve added any customization to your guestbook so these links will take you to a simple, uninteresting guestbook. Time for some customization. Click on the link at the bottom of the page that says “To Service Manager”. From the service manager page you will be able to edit, or delete, messages left in your guestbook, get you html code to place on your website, customize the look of your guestbook with colors, layouts and your own images and even add your own questions to the form that your site visitors will fill out in order to post entries into your guestbook.

5) Lastly. After you have gone through the service manager section, and inputted all of the data that you want on your guestbook, it will be time to install your guestbook onto your own website. Simply copy your guestbook’s html coding and paste it onto your website, where ever you would like it. Now, you have a guestbook for your visitors to enjoy! The process of creating your Bravenet guestbook generally takes about 15-20 minutes depending upon how detailed you want your guestbook to look. Everything on the Bravenet guestbook is customizable, from the button colors to the background. Have fun with it!

These are just a simple set of steps for building a Bravenet guestbook. The Bravenet website is so easy to use that anyone could create a beautiful and fully functional guestbook for any type of website out there. You don’t have to be a programming expert in order to work with Bravenet.

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