freshening content
| Third party add-ons are a cheap, effective and low maintenance way to bring greater functionality to your site.
When the web development budget is already stretched, third party offerings can breathe new life into a tired site. Here we take a look at what’s currently available, what’s hot and what’s not. Before embarking on a functionality-fest, there are a few questions to consider about any new content you may wish to add:
With all that in mind then, what’s out there to excite the interest of our site users? Newsfeeds [Temperature rating: Hot] These are excellent devices to put fresh content on your site on a daily basis. The bad news is that there are now very few newsfeeds that are both good and free. The good news is that the ones that fit the above criteria do offer a fair amount of flexibility in terms of news content and customisation. Take care when choosing which news you put on your site for your visitors. If your users are primarily UK based, very few will be interested in reading the latest updates on American baseball. Where possible, target the news to your audience’s interests to maximise the relevance and add value to your site. Implementing a news service is no more complicated than copying and pasting in a small chunk of code onto the receiving page. Generally, newsfeed providers offer a range of delivery options. These normally include: · a simple text link Which option to go for depends on your site design and personal preferences. Take a look at: This is a subjective one: there are pro and con arguments here. On the one hand, and it is a sound reason, weather is perennially one of the top keywords searched for on the net. After Britney Spears and Bin Laden, anyway. On the other mitt, do your visitors need, or want, to know the weather forecast in your area? As regular readers will recall, we’ve touched on this one before. Obviously it’s an issue relevant to a tourism-related business, but not one selling widgets. Another minus is that the script that underlies the feature can be very slow, especially if the server providing the service is taking a hammering. The net result often is a sluggish web page. The fix is either putting the weather box at the foot of the page, or moving this particular ‘whistle and bell’ off the index page altogether. Take a look at: http://www.onlineweather.com/ Guest books are a great way to encourage interaction and feedback from your users. Most free guest books sit on external servers, which means there’s little or no impact on your bandwidth quota. It also means there’s no guarantees on reliability or uptime. Be careful also which guest book you select. Many free guest books look like redundant East European architects of the Stalinist school have designed them. And be sure that there is the ability to edit the guest book to remove unwanted messages. You should also be aware that these guest books are, in the main, not a free lunch. While there may be no cost, the price is exposing your users to adverts which you may have little or no control over. To be fair, though, there are some free guest books that come sans adverts, but these are few and far between. Here are some of the better offerings available. Take a look at: Make your site sticky with an addictive game or two that visitors can play online. There are lots of fiendish games to download for free. Again, it is a case of copying and pasting in some code to drop into a page. Once you get them hooked, users will make repeat visits to your site thus increasing the number of sales opportunities. A handy “bookmark this site” link on the index page will help ensure visitors re-find your site. If a game requires a browser plug-in, such as Shockwave, always spell this out and provide a download link. Finally, before copying and pasting code take time to plan how all this new content is going to fit into your site. Where is it going to sit? And how will users navigate to it? When planning any development on your site it can save a lot of frustration by taking a step back and making an assessment from the user’s viewpoint. After all, you know your customers and what they demand, so get inside their head and take a critical look at your site from their perspective. With web development of any kind, the imperative is to construct a site that is not only easy to use, but also informative and carries out the function it is designed to do. In the final analysis, you are designing a tool that changes people’s behaviour. Regrettably, in a sense, it’s not a Dirty Harry-style Magnum. It is, when you refine it down to its essential essence, a collection of interactive pictures that are linked together. |