Bravenet is perfect for those intermediate and advanced users. It's a straight forward, no holds, web page tool provider. They have a wide selection of tools with some pretty in-depth customization options. And being able to shape these tools to your own web site's style is very valuable. This site is really worth checking out. The tools include, guestbooks, message boards, chat rooms, e-mail forms, greeting cards, fast URLs, link pages, hit counters, search engines, mailing lists, vote casters, daily cartoons and much more.

Signing Up
      Signing up is as easy as 1-2-3. Just fill out a couple forms, and you're on your way. You only need to sign up once, and they let you have access to all the tools they provide. All you have to do is register them.

Editing the Tools
      After you sign in, you're presented with a list of tools and management functions. From there you can setup, customize and edit all your tools. Change anything from the basic colors of the page to images you want displayed to how the tools work. You have a lot of power over them, which is one of the most important things when it comes to free services like these. They even have "How-To" pages on configuring the tools.

The Ads
      Bravenet is very generous when it comes to advertizing. Most of the time the tool has one advertisement and a small, discreet link to them. I was really impressed with their tendency to not plug themselves all over the place. These guys come in first when it comes to non-ad saturation, almost Fat-Free!

Features
      The tools that Bravenet offers have too many feature to list here so here's just a couple. Besides being able to edit the colors of the guestbooks and message board, you can specify a custom image for the top of the page and custom horizontal rules. For more information on making custom horizontal rules, go to the "Custom Bullets and Horizontal Rules" article in the artist section. You can also add additional questions in the guestbook for people to answer. Also, the VoteCaster can be made to ask more than one question. And you can also sign up to make money by advertising Bravenet on your web site, regardless of your site's size.

Summary
      Bravenet is by far one of the best web page tool providers out there. If you want fast, reliable service that is easily customizable without an overload of ads, Bravenet is the way to go. Even if it is your first time using one of these tools, they provide a list of resources that will help you use your tools. We give them five cows!

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