You can't do this with the free space that your ISP gives you, it says so in the terms and conditions.

You may be able to do this on your space from a free webhost, but to be sure, you need to read the conditions of use.

Personally, I wouldn't advise running a business on a site where ads for your competitors may suddenly pop up over your page.

Later versions of FrontPage, I believe from version 2000 onwards (but I am not really sure because I don't use it) use what are called FrontPage extensions.

These allow you to add extra features to your pages. However for these extensions to work, your webhost has to have the FrontPage extensions installed on their server.

Note You can turn off the extensions in the options, then any of the menu commands that require the extensions to be on the server, are dimmed out and unavailable. This means that you can use FrontPage to create your web site even if your web host doesn't provide the FrontPage extensions

At the time of writing, the basic ISP and free hosting servers don't offer this service. It is only available on the paid for hosting. However with Microsoft's pervasion into all things computing, this situation may change in the future.

Common Gateway Interface, whether provided by Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP CFML etc. etc. allow you to use many advanced features on your site.

These include things such as guestbooks, counters, forms for gathering and storing information from visitors, shopping trolleys, chat rooms and the list goes on.

However all of these require the special software on the server to make them work. As far as I am aware, these are only available on the paid for webhosting.

Apart from requiring the software mentioned above to make this possible, this type of business needs to be done on a secure server.

Many people are wary about giving their credit card number on a web site and they won't want to do it on an insecure server. And you shouldn't want to do it either. If something went wrong, you would be responsible.

The companies that offer this service on secure servers, are also responsible if something goes wrong. Hey let them worry.

You can have a guestbook where visitors can introduce themselves and leave comments, but actually only a very small percentage actually take the time to do this (by the way have you signed my guestbook yet?. Why not sign the guestbook before you leave today)

You can have a counter, but that only lets you know how many people have accessed your site.

Where you can get some really information is through the statistics that you get with the paid for web hosting. You access this by logging onto the administration page at your site.

Here are some of the things that I can find out about visitors to my web site.

The number of visits to each page, broken down monthly, weekly, daily and hourly.

The country that the visitor is in.

The webhost that they were on before they jumped to my site.

The operating system and browser that the visitor is using.

What words they typed into a search engine to find my site.

And much more, a lot of this information is also displayed visually in a graph.

This allows you to have your visitors send e-mail's to different departments e.g.. sales, enquiries, support etc.

Depending upon the package you go for, these can be real individual mailboxes, or on the cheaper plans, pseudo mail boxes where all of the e-mail's are redirected to your main mailbox, though you do get an indication of the department that the sender is mailing to.

Yes I know that you often get five e-mail addresses from your ISP, but the ones from the paid webhosts are connected to your domain name e.g. sale@aifweb.com

Well, there may be other things that I have forgotten, or even things that I haven't even thought of, I am relatively new to this web creation stuff myself. Don't worry, my students will soon let me know about any glaring omission's.

But that is plenty to be going on with.

So now it's over to you to make you decision, but just in case you are still not sure here are some words of advice