How do you put greeting cards on your site? First, pick a theme or two. If your site is about model railroads, for example, you might get some photos of trains and train sets; you could include vacation photos, cute animal pictures, scanned drawings or anything else that you feel would make a good card. Just remember to honor copyrights - make sure you have right to make copies of materials before you use them.

Once you have a theme or two, you need to find a greeting card service. I've experimented with a few options. I've tried hosting it entirely on my own site, and what I've found is it is difficult to maintain. I've also tried it completely hosted on another site and found it is too restrictive.

The service that I settled upon is called CyberGreeting Network - http://cybergreet.net/. This company, in my opinion, provides best of both worlds (local and remotely hosted).

The pages, images and sound files are stored on your own web site. You can tailor these all that you want so they blend with your pages perfectly. This is perfect freedom, and as long as you set up form properly all will work fine.

How do you do this? You download a template file (as explained in their instructions) and modify it to suite your needs. This may require a little effort on your part (as well as some skill with HTML) but end result will be worth it.

The remote part of product (which is free, by way) is piece that actually formats and sends card. You see, on your page you get visitor to supply answers to a series of questions in a form. The form data is submitted to a CGI routine which puts everything together into a greeting card. Your visitor simply answers questions and presses submit. You pass all of this to routine, which then sends card to destination.

I was able to get half a dozen pages of greeting cards working perfectly in an afternoon. These remain on my site, and serve me well by creating a steady, growing stream of traffic. I think you would do well to take a look and determine if this will work for your site as well.

Some sites with good "tell-a-friend" scripts are listed below.

- http://www.sitegadgets.com/ - Remotely hosted script usable by any web site.

- http://www.dtp-aus.com - Hosted locally on your own server, requires CGI access.

For an example of a tell-a-friend script, check out:

http://www.internet-tips.net ellafriend.htm

This is copthis script from http://www.dtp-aus.com. It requires that you have access to CGI on your host. However, remotely hosted versions (which can be used from any HTML page) basically look same and perform same functions.

So what does a tell-a-friend script do? At very least, it accepts your email address and email address of a friend. Once that information has been entered, friend is sent an email which states that you have recommended site to him. That's a very critical piece of information - a person is recommending site, and it's a person who is known (presumably) to friend.

The better scripts also allow your visitors (and you) to enter their name. The very best scripts allow more than one name and email address to be entered at a time, and your visitors can even include a comment such as "check out this site - it's great". I also like those scripts which provide for an email to be sent to me when someone refers my site - this way, I know if people are taking advantage of this feature.

You will get more results if you include form itself on each and every page of your site. You will find this on many sites such as zdnet - they have a form which allows you to enter a persons email address and name. This sends them a quick email saying that you recommend site to them.

You will not see an incredible burst in traffic due to these forms. What you will see is people referring your site to their friends, which will cause more (and higher quality) traffic. I've noticed that when someone receives a referral they stay longer and, if you sell something, they are more likely to buy something.