How To add a Chat Room to Your Blog or Website!

Chatting or instant messaging, as we all know, is very fun and useful. Sometimes, you need to chat with your buddy in case you don’t want to give them a call but want a little conversation. Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk, etc are popular for instant messaging. You need an account on the service and to know each others IDs in order to chat, but what about chatting with website or blog visitors?

A website or blog visitor will chat with you only if it’s made very easy for them. There are many reasons why you might place a chatroom on your blog. Note, that this chatroom we are talking about is not a private one. It’s like a Yahoo Chat room. Anyone can join the conversation.  Now, why would you need a chat room on your site?

Well, you might just want to increase the time people spend on your website. If yours is a social networking site, you will definitely love it. You might want your blog visitors to have a place where they all can chat with each other. You can even place this chat room on your Orkut or MySpace or hi5 profile so that you can chat with whoever is visiting your profile. Now, the question is, how do you place a chat room on your website, blog or social networking profile?

99Chats

99Chats allows you to sign up and create your very own chat room that you can embed on any website or blog you like. This service creates a custom chat room based on the information you enter and then generates a code that needs to be placed on the preferred website in order for the browser to show the chat room there.  Here’s how you can create your own chat room on 99Chats for free and embed it on your website or blog.

Sign Up

Visit 99Chats and click the Sign Up text that sits right below the big blue login button.

Create a New Chat Room

As soon as you register, you will be introduced with the Chat room builder that looks like the picture below:

This will let you choose your Chat room name and customize its design. As you can see, it has options to set language, category, tags, theme, size and background color. This way you can build a custom chat room for your website or blog.

Copy the Code

In the next screen, you will be given two different types of code to embed your newly built chat room. I think, the second one (Javascript code) will work on most sites, so you can copy it before embedding it on your website. If one doesn’t work for any reason, try the other one.

Embed Chat Room

Now, simply go to your website’s editing panel, create a new page and paste the code. If you are using WordPress (self-hosted), you can create a new page and paste the javascript code in the HTML mode of the post editing screen. Same for Blogger users. Add the new page and paste the code for the chat room to be shown.

After publishing the page that contains the 99chats code, you can visit it from your browser to see your chat room live on the internet. This is how your chat room will look like (color and size will differ based on your settings).