How to add a shout box to your website

If you want to initiate interaction between your visitors, a shout box is going to help a lot. A shout box is like a chat box, wherein visitors can leave messages for you and all the others to see. They can send thank you notes, commendations, and almost anything that they feel about your website. They can also use the shout box to ask questions from you or from other visitors having the same interest.

To add a shout box to your site and fire up some discussion, you are going to need a shout box script. There are lots of them out there, most of them freeware.

Let’s use the shout box PHP script called Shoutbox 1.1 for ease of discussion. But then, the instructions installing other PHP script should be more or less the same. Here are the steps:

1. Search and download the PHP script called Shoutbox 1.1. You can also use this link:

http://phpform.net/shoutbox.php

2. Unzip the file.

3. Upload the entire folder to your hosting server via FTP.

4. Browse through the Shoutbox folder and look for the sett.php file.

5. Right click on it and try to set the chmod permission to 666.

6. Chmod 644 the config.php file as well.

7. Open a web browser and open shout.php. You can do so using this format: http://yourwebsite.com/shout.php. Be sure to change yourwebsite.com to the actual URL of your site.

8. There will be step-by-step instructions on your screen. Just follow them. And supply whatever is required.

9. Installation is complete.

10. Now put this code exactly where you’d like the Shoutbox to appear on your website:

When you open up your site, you should see the shout box there now. Try it and it should work. Note: Your server has to be PHP compatible for this script to work.