Advice About Every Single Problem in the World—Get It Online!

By Carolyn Smith

Do a Google search for "online advice column" and your screen will fill with page after page of links to thousands and thousands of websites devoted to offering suggestions, encouragement, helpful hints, constructive criticism—just about any type of advice you might be looking for. From family interactions to how to manage money, from clothing advice to eating advice, you can find an answer to any question.

Some advice sites are professional counseling services that feature degreed psychiatrists, counselors, or therapists. Some are run by students, housewives, or small business owners, and some are run by people with a specific area of expertise. Some of the sites are even created by kids, for kids. Many of the advice columns are fairly straightforward with a familiar format, along the lines of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, and other newspaper columns you may have read for years. Others are more esoteric. Whatever type of situation you need advice for, there is a website out there that can help.

Wondir.com is an interesting advice site that strives to provide a way for a person to ask a question and get an answer from an organization, corporation, or service provider specifically qualified to provide that answer. The service is free, and most answers are provided within minutes of the question being asked. There are thousands of contributors to Wondir, all of whom are just a click away from offering information, guidance, and expertise about a wide variety of topics as diverse as pets, medications, firearms, and dreams, just to name a few.

JustAnswer.com is a unique advice site that also connects people with questions to the people best qualified to answer them. What makes this site unique is that the answers don’t come for free. Registering with the site doesn’t cost anything, but when you ask a question you must post a refundable deposit in order to get answers to your question. You set the price you’re willing to pay for a helpful answer, and then wait to see who responds. Answers from Experts (people qualified by the site to provide answers) usually arrive within an hour, and you can choose which answers you want to unlock. If you don’t like an answer, you can disregard it and not pay for it. If you find an answer useful, you can accept it and pay for it.

Kidsonline.net is a site unabashedly designed for kids and only kids. The site’s creator, Mike Barnard, tells his site visitors, "Look at what’s happening around you with an open mind. The most important thing to remember is never let anyone else do your thinking for you." However, there is a part of the site that gives kids the opportunity to ask someone to do some thinking for them. The new editor of the advice column section of the site, JOANOFARC2COOL, says on the homepage, "i am really excited, because i love giving advice!" Following that exuberant intro, she further explains, "i am the new person or what ever its called to answer your questens or q’s as I call them! so send me your props and I will answer them!" The Kidsonline.net site has won several major Internet awards for the honest, wholesome Internet community it has created for kids.

When all of your serious questions have been answered and you need to wind down with a good laugh, check out AskTheCollegeGuy.com, a nationally syndicated column that provides humor and only semi-serious advice for entertainment purposes only. The site cautions, "If you are in dire need of completely serious answers or advice, please consult a trained professional." AskTheCollegeGuy.com tells site visitors that there are two kinds of people in the world—those who tell you what you want to hear and those who tell you what you need to hear. They go on to explain that they not only tell you what you need to hear, but they "extend the added courtesy of telling you how dumb you are for not knowing it already."