To help fulfill this desire for everything "now, now, now!", many Internet businesses make use of autoresponders. These programs automatically return a prewritten message to anyone who sends a message to autoresponder's email address. They usually allow for several follow-up messages as well.

Autoresponders are a real blessing to online businesses - particularly small businesses where there's often just 1 or 2 employees and a huge amount of work! Autoresponders:

= Save time. Many inquiries are same -- why answer them all manually when you can automate it?

= Save money. Have your autoresponder automatically provide information, instead of paying someone to do it for you. Plus it will free you up to tend to more profitable tasks.

= Increase sales. Put your sales effort on auto-pilot! Very few people will make a purchase first time they visit a site. They want to mull it over, maybe do a little research, and come back later. But any number of things could prevent them from buying 'later'. Use a follow-up autoresponder to keep in touch with your prospects. You're more likely to catch them at a time that they're 'ready to buy'.

What SSI amounts to is creating a new page for any elements common to all pages on your site. Then ask server to include these pages whenever main pages are requested.

For example, build a regular HTML page containing all content, including graphics, as is often used in left column of a page as basis of navigation. Then, instead of adding this content to each page, simply include file. And hey, it's super. If you need to make a change, you make it only once, instead of on every page on your site.

SSI Slows Page Downloads?

What prevented me initially from using SSI were notes I read regards increasing page download time. Each page using included files needs to parsed (read) by server to find any files to be included. Being an absolute fanatic about minimizing page download speed, I passed. Bad mistake.

Updating Multiple Pages Chews Up Time

Six month later, changing a single menu item was taking hours. I decided to ignore page download time and go. But I ran into another snag. Pages with includes need SHTML extension, else server won't parse them. (An S in front of HTML.)

Switching From HTML to SHTML Busts Links

Nuts. I already had lots of incoming links. Since I didn't want to bust them by changing file names, I passed once again.

I had heard people speak of ways in which a server in some cases could be instructed to treat HTML pages as SHTML pages. But I didn't check it out. Another bad mistake.

The Perfect Solution

Many months later I ran across following code. Add these lines to top of your .htaccess file, and all existing HTML files will be parsed just as if they had .SHTML extension. Neat. No changes in file names, which means no busted incoming links.

Options Includes AddType text/html .html AddHandler server-parsed .html

.htaccess is a hidden file in root directory on your server. It is helpful in doing many things, and can be located elsewhere as needed, but for now let's focus on above.

In WS_FTP, when you type -al into blank field to right, this file name will become visible. The best plan is to download file, add above code, then upload and overwrite original. (The reason for downloading first is to be certain you hold whatever file may already contain.)

Creating Files

What I did next was create a file, yleftnav.html, containing all content in left column of a page. Then on each page, I replaced content in that column with following.