Now what can you use autoresponders for? It's as limitless as your imagination! Some common uses include:

= Free reports or articles. = Sales letters. = Information about your various products or services. = Email training courses. = Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). = Advertising rate cards. = Order acknowledgements or confirmations. = Newsletters.

There are loads of autoresponders available on 'net. ROIbot ( http://www.roibot.com/r_r.cgi?R46886_nn ) offers a follow-up autoresponder bundled with several tools, including an ad tracker. Or try WorkYourLeads ( http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R46886_auto ) if you're looking for an unlimited number of autoresponders.

Of course, automation isn't appropriate in every circumstance. Many people have had utterly infuriating experience of receiving a distinctly unhelpful, automated reply to an inquiry. It's important to remember that an autoresponder is only a tool; there are many situations in which your personal attention is absolutely vital. Make sure that your visitors are still able to contact you directly.

Small business owners often play role of marketer, product developer, administrative assistant, janitor, customer support, and anything else that's required. Autoresponders offload some of that work so that you can concentrate on important task of building your business. Try them - you'll love it!

The display of this page will be distorted, but it works fine when constrained by first cell/column on each site page.

I'm also using ybotnav.html for text links and contact info at bottom of each page. Anything repeated on most or all pages can be handled in this way.

Finally Getting To It

I continued to avoid chore for many months. And when I did get to it, hours disappeared quickly, for by then I had more pages.

But hey, I do love it. And there's good news besides. Those notes regards slowing page downloads (they're still around), appear to have applied in an earlier time when servers were slower. I haven't detected any increase in download time for pages on my site.

Get to this right now, before your site grows even larger. Whatever time it takes will be saved many times over on future changes required.

Test First

Before getting carried away, be sure to test to see that whatever code you choose works properly on your host server. If it does not, and your host can't help you, then you may be stuck with renaming page name extensions to .SHTML. Which also means changing links internal to your site. And losing any links to your site. (Even this option isn't available on all hosts.)

An Alternative

Here is another include command I am not using on my site. It assumes all files to be included are in /includes/, a subdirectory within directory containing your pages.

Since my site layout is simple, and includes only three subdirectories for pages, I simply uploaded files to be included to these three directories, and to root directory. For me, this is a great solution for it takes only minutes to upload four copies. You might do better, however, with above.

Further Resources

What triggered me into action was Jennifer Johnson's article, "How To Avoid Website Growing Pains." She's been trying to talk me into using SSI for years. I should have listened to her and got to it sooner. (And so should you!) Here's a link to her article.

Here's a page from Webopedia given a search on SSI. Lots of great info referenced here. Follow link to Yahoo for a couple more. As a reminder, that bit about slowing download speed is included in one of referenced articles. I'd ignore this, for I found no degradation at all.

Wrapping Up

I should have done this years ago. Do it now. Or you'll be saying same thing in a year or so. Honest, you will!