April 2002

Website Technique
Free and Cool Content

You can get all kinds of free content and interactive elements for your website. Although I never advocate making your website a circus arena many of the things I present in this article may make sense for you.

For instance I helped Carolyn White who has the site
http://www.debtnomore.com come up with financial calculators that make perfect sense for her site. She helps peolple find the true cost of their credit card debt, how much they can save by paying their mortgage down faster, etc. These calculators make perfect sense for her to have on her site.

I'll show you were to get lots of this stuff. You must make the decision what, if any of it, makes sense for you to use. In some cases you would simply put a link to the site (in a new browser window so they have to return to your site) or put the code they give you into your website. Plus, don't be surprised if some of the links don't work by the time you get around to trying them. This is the Internet and free sites come and go.

Currency Converters
http://www.xe.net/ucc/ 
http://www.ljsp.com/currency.htm 
http://www.accu-rate.ca/converter/acconv.htm 
http://www.moneyextra.com/rates/currency/converter 
http://www.tradehere.com/calculator/converter.html 
http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/currency/currcalc.cgi

Time Converters
http://www.worms-armageddon.de/htm/converter.html 
http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc 
http://www.travelsites.com/timeconverter.html 
http://theage.com.au/info/wtc/agewtc.html 
http://www.eaci.net/chat/converter.html

Metric Converters
http://www.allmath.com/metric.asp
http://www.worldwidemetric.com/metcal.htm 
http://www.onlinedconversion.com
http://www.chinaimporters.com/metrical.htm 
http://www.convert-me.com/en/ 
http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/Humor/Funny-Metric-Chart.html  (Funny)

All Kinds of Calculators
http://www.webwinder.com/wwhtmbin/javacalc.html 
http://autos.yahoo.com/calcs.html  Calculator for leasing or owning a vehicle
http://www.hsh.com/calculators.html  Financial http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calc_home.asp  Mortgage and Cost of Living
http://www.btimes.co.za/calc/calc.htm  Tax Return and Expense

Language Translators
http://babelfish.altavista.com  Online Language translator. Just pop in text from an email or an entire website and get an instant translation.
http://translation.langenberg.com/  Webpage Translator
http://www.tranexp.com / Software
http://www.translation-experts.com/  Software
http://www.alis.com/cgi-bin/transdemo.pl 
http://rivendel.com/~ric/resources/free.html  Lots of online translators
http://www.freetranslation.com/ 
http://www.shortbus.net/dialect.html  Funny dialect translator (Jive, Buckwheat)
http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/  Another funny translator (Redneck, Elmer Fudd, Moron, etc.)

Clocks
http://www.panaga.com/clocks/clocks.htm#sun  Massive number of cool clocks and countdown meters you can put on your website.
http://www.activeearth.com/ 

Free Software for Websites
http://www.bignosebird.com/ 
http://www.tucows.com/ 
http://www.tudogs.com/ 
http://www.reallybig.com/ 

Streaming News
Another way to get them to return is to have news. There are places out there that will send news directly to your site daily or hourly whatever the case may be. This is called "streaming content." So people can simply check your website for their news. There are many different industry news feeds. Many of these news feeds use Java Applets. Just make sure you don't junk up your important search engine pages too much with the code necessary to make these news feeds display.

http://www.webticker.com 
http://www.7am.com/ 
http://www.tickerland.com/  Put YOUR news on other sites
http://kresch.com/resources/Content/News/ 
http://kresch.com/resources/Content/News_Tickers/
http://www.anaconda.net/ 
http://www.wunderground.com/about/faq/weathersticker.asp  (weather)
http://www.weatherbyemail.com/  (weather)
http://oap.weather.com/oap/index.html  (weather)
http://weatherguys.com/webmaster.html  (weather)
http://isyndicate.com/ 
http://www.newsindex.com/ 
http://www.website101.com/freecontent.html 
 

A WORD ABOUT THE WORD "FREE"
When I say you can get most of the above content for free, in some cases that has strings attached. Yes, it's true that lots of the above stuff is totally free. But in some cases the word "Free" actually means "Advertising Supported." This can still be a good deal for you, but you do need to understand what that means.

If someone gives you a free service, that usually means that they will display some kind of ad near the service. In many cases you can pay them a small fee per month and they will give you the service, but eliminate the ad.

One of the free services I provide is Free Email. You can get an account at http://www.GreatSpeaking.com This is actually a two level deal. A big company in California provides this service to me. I could get it for free, but I chose to pay their small monthly fee so that I would get all the ad space seen by people that sign up for the free email. The people that sign up for the free email get the service totally free, but they have to see my ads as payment for me providing the email service.