Let’s begin with the benefits of a tableless layout. These are only in the order that I feel they should go in, some things are more important to other people, so rank them as you will.
Forces You To Write Well-Formed Code
You cannot have a properly made tableless layout, and use improper and non-standard code. Well, let me correct that - you can (technically you can do it) but it defeats the whole purpose. When you are creating a tableless design, you should be using standards compliant code. I think that anything that makes you get into the habit of always writing clean code is a good thing.
Faster Loading Time
This is absolutely a benfit of a tableless layout, and for several reasons. First, on a fundamental level - tables load slowly. For the most part, unless you set the height and width of your table elements, all the text has to be loaded and rendered BEFORE the table sizes itself to the page. Of course, this is what so many people loved about tables isn’t it? The fact that they were so easily sizeable. The downside is how much more time they take to load.
Okay, so the solution to that loading time is to set all the values explicitly, right? So now we see another downside. Code clutter that increases loading time. First of all, just by themselves, tables take alot of code. How many td open and close tags does your average table based layout have? Tons. Having to set all the values explicitly only adds to the page size and loading time. There are many experiments that have been done on this topic, There was one that StopDesign did on a remake of the Microsoft website from a tablebased site to a tableless layout. That remake showed a 62% file size reduction of the site, and using their average hits per month for the Microsoft site, calculated that Microsoft would be saving 924 GIGS in bandwidth per day, and 329 Terabytes of bandwidth per year. For any company that pays for bandwidth, these things are important.
Easier to Read Code
If you are using standard code, semantic document conventions, and a tableless layout, your code can be so clean that it looks practically like just regular text with a few extra symbols.
That is a great benefit because it not only makes it easier for you to update, but it makes it easier for a non-technical user to make small alterations to. Additionally, if you work as a web developer in a more freelance capacity, it is common for there to be a full-time web developer who has to maintain that site. Clean and simple to read code makes that a easy transition. We like it when people leave us easy to understand code, right? Let’s return the favor.
Print Alternate Views
When you create a page using a table-layout, you are rather unfortunately locked into a certain layout. Developers who have created table-based websites, as most of us have at some point - particularly if you were in the the industry before the big tableless movement, know that you often have to create a separate printable version of your pages. This can be, needless to say, quite tiresome.
Ease of printing style control is a huge benefit with a tableless layout. You can easily create a single new printing style that applies to all your pages, instead of making them individually. That alone is a huge time saver, but there is more.
While you can control all elements with this approach, the biggest key is organization of information within the page itself. Using the example, let’s assume that the display order we want all our pages to print using the following order: The page header first, the content next, the special news after that, then the link list, and then the footer. However! We still want it to display as it would normally when viewing (meaning the header at the top, the links on the left, content in the middle, news on the right, and footer at the bottom). With a table-based layout, you would have to create a new page to do that special printing organization because the print style will read your columns left to right. With a table-less layout, you are not bound by this. You can order the content in your page however you like, and still control the way it looks… all by using the CSS only!
Additionally, because we can put the content in whatever order we want in the HTML, and then move the content blocks around for website viewing using CSS - we can have ultimate control over presentation.
That is very important because the clean code, and ability to alter presentation, means that your site can be viewable by someone on a small mobile phone screen, a PDA, in all text format can be perfect for someone using a text-to-speech reader, or a braille device, and since the code is clean, it is both backward compatible (with older browsers seeing mostly just the text) and forward compatible with new technologies to come. The flexibilty and organization leads to being able to create a powerful website that takes advantage of some of the possibilities with XHTML, and adding in support in your pages for microformats, or taking advantage of using RSS / ATOM feeds from your site to develop a base of regular readers.
Search Engine Optimization
Due to the fact that you can organize your most important content at the top of your page, without affecting the layout, your page can be better optimized for search engines. For instance, say that I have a navigation bar on the left side of the page that lists tons of parts of the site that are actually great keywords. I could move that navigation bar code higher up in my actual HTML, without changing the layout, because I’m using the CSS to position the navigation where I want it.
Those search engines can also more clearly find common words throughout your document without having to filter through code. Search engines prioritize websites that have a higher content to code ratio, so putting all your style elements into your external CSS stylesheet makes your site highly content based to a search engine. Tableless layouts, as previously mentioned, decrease page size and loading time - another bonus to search engines.
Additionally, being able to take advantage of the RSS/ATOM feeds (see the section directly above) will aid you in some new technology for site indexing as used by all search engines called ROR. (ROR is an XML format summary of your website, like a sitemap, that search engines can access for additional information about your website.)
Presentation Flexibility
Making changes to a CSS based Tableless layout is simple. You can alter the CSS file only, changing as many styles and graphics as you want. The affects cascade through all the pages on your website, and eliminate the need for manually updating many pages.
For one of the best known examples of how powerful presentation can be, you can visit the CSS Zen Garden (link at the end of article) and navigate through the ‘Select a Design’ links to see the differences. Each of the different designs uses exactly the same HTML file content. The only thing that changes is the CSS file for each one.
Selling Yourself On Standards
Sometimes knowing how to code for standards, and create flexible tableless layouts is not enough. There are some web designers who meet with difficulties from their management. Most often those difficulties are rooted in the management being unaware of the benefits of using tableless content and CSS driven layout.
If you want to design for standards, but you work for a company that is not very forward-thinking in allowing you the time to work on the changes try this: Make them think about their pocket-book. Point out the cost saving benefits.
For instance, try grabbing a single page of existing code. Clean it up to standards. Compare the page size to before (including image optimization), and count the difference in bytes saved. Multiply that across the number of site pages, and the number of days per month. Then explain to them the amount of bandwidth cost saved monthly if this was done across the whole site. If that isn’t enough, show them how quickly you can make changes to a website once it is CSS driven, and push the idea that you will be able to change the site more rapidly when there are needed updates, and you will have more time to focus on adding in new functionality to the site - instead of spending your time doing maintenance.
Summary
Hopefully, this little article will serve as a way to get you started on understanding why to use a tableless layout, what the benefits are, and you can easily take a look at Layout Gala (link below article) and download just 1, or all 40 of the tableless layout examples to get you started. However, the best step toward moving to a tableless design is to slowly move your website toward a standard compliant version first, before you get rid of the tables. To get to that point, study as much on CSS as you can, read through the articles here and elsewhere on the web, and moving from table layouts to tableless will be just a matter of time.
Note: View the original article, including all 9 image examples.
Links mentioned in the article: CSS Zen Garden, Layout Gala.
Nicole Hernandez is a web developer with a specialty in web standards and accessibility. She is the owner of Website Style and publishes technical articles on her blog called Beyond Caffeine.
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Trends and Findings
Over the last few years, we have identified a number of common features and trends in system security, malicious attacks, and general web application testing. Of these, a number of the security testing issues are of some interest and can be addressed over time through a targeted approach.
In the last 18 months we have performed incident response and incident management for a relatively significant number of large clients. Through this, it is apparent that approximately 50% of the compromises that have taken place have done so through application level attacks. In general terms, the root cause of the attacks were:
1. Vendor provided software (including both off the shelf and custom) having a number of insecurities and software vulnerabilities which the customer was unaware of
2. A single misconfiguration resulting in a full compromise indicating a lack of a defence in depth strategy and implementation
Other points we have observed are that:
Server and Operating System level attacks are tending to plateau, with larger companies significantly worse than smaller companies in managing both vulnerabilities and insecurities.
There were relatively few “zero-day” attacks; most attacks were the result of automated tool scanning attacks.
The detection of attacks was in the main abysmal, with the compromises only being detected as a result of aberrant behaviour by systems.
We have also performed a huge amount of network and application intrusion testing (penetration testing) over the last few years, with a number of emerging trends:
Infrastructure level testing is seeing a reduction in insecurities, largely due to improved trends around vulnerability management.
A web application deployment by a fresh (new) client is likely to have a significant number of web application security issues, with everything from exposed databases through to SQL injection level attacks being possible. Further testing over time indicates that a relationship with a security company for source security testing purposes results in a reduction of insecurities in the web applications.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall”. There appears to be a defined trend towards the larger companies having a higher number of insecurities, particularly in the web application space. The root cause of this is unclear; however there is a relationship with outsourcing, and the need for a large organization to “secure everything”. This also applies to smaller companies; however the smaller companies tend to have significantly less infrastructure to worry about.
Certainly we have seen vulnerability management and analysis starting to be applied within organizations; however it is only really the network, operating system, and server levels that are being worked on by most companies. This is largely based around the notion that vulnerability scanning and remediation products and services are maturing in this space. Certainly while there are maturing tools in the application security testing space, they are still quite reactive, and will take a number of years to be both mature and mainstream.
From the vulnerability research and analysis that we have been performing, it is apparent that application development is still poor in terms of security. Not all of this can be blamed directly on the developers; with so much pressure to get product out the door, security is often given a back seat. We also need to focus on training our software developers to code securely but we are presently doing an abysmal job at it. A number of the application layer security vulnerabilities we are seeing in both off the shelf and open source systems are merely new instances already well known vulnerabilities. How long have we known about buffer overflows and SQL injection issues? So why are we still seeing them? For further discussion around some of this, see Brett Moore’s Ruxcon presentation on “same bug, different app”.
As a final note for this section, as an organisation we are really excellent at application testing and source code analysis, but really hate being the ones that break a system 2 days before it is scheduled to go live. The stats are there; design security in at early phases of the project, and the cost and impact of remediation is much less than trying to fix it when you are just about to roll it out, and dramatically cheaper than trying to fix it once in production. We are starting to see a trend towards compliance and security assurance climbing the systems development life cycle value chain. Long may it continue…!
COTS
So who tests vendor products (Common Off The Shelf) for web application security issues before they are rolled into production environments? Particularly where it has previously been deployed into other client sites? Really? How many of you review source code security in code developed by your outsourcer and / or development team?
We have seen the good and the bad in this space. In a number of cases we have tested and broken web applications that are in widespread use around the world, and have found them seriously lacking. This is not necessarily just a plug for how good we are; it is more an indictment on the lack of application security testing performed by other companies that have purchased and implemented these products. Really guys, some of the attacks and exploits were just plain basic…
The message really is to at least do a source code review where possible, or an application intrusion test where you can. COTS systems are not automatically secure simply as a result of how widely they are deployed. If you are concerned about the security of a product, get the developers to release the source code to you for assurance and testing. Based on our findings, at least 20-30% of web applications (either COTS provided or outsourced) have significant vulnerabilities.
What about your outsourced application development? Of course you do realize that you are accountable for poor software security and are performing source code audits appropriately when code is delivered? Seriously though, there is a real lack of due diligence in reviewing delivered systems at either the application or source code level, for which we believe the primary reason is a lack of applied accountability, and (up until recently) this stuff hasn’t necessarily been cheap to test. The other big issue that we find is a general lack of security testing standards, and security standards in application development.
Products and tools are getting to the point where it is possible now to perform reasonable compliance checks and security audits against vendor / outsourcer provided systems without the inherent costs associated with manual source code audits. Measure their performance! Accountability is not something that can be outsourced easily, and reasonable practice is to ensure that your contract with your vendor / outsourcer at least includes your expectactions of web coding standards and practices (or at least review and scrutinize theirs), and to perform some form of compliance checking of these standards against the delivered code. How otherwise do you know whether the delivered application is secure? Blind trust and faith?
Open Source
There has been some significant debate over the security of either closed or open source systems and it is clear that, in the web application security space particularly, there does not appear to be any significant differences. From our code reviews using CodeScan, the numbers of issues found in COTS products and Open Source appear on the surface to be similar.
Across Open Source applications that we have tested with CodeScan, we are finding all of the common suspects; Cross Site Scripting is rampant, and SQL Injection is still there to degrees that are kind of interesting. And these systems are deployed and exploited globally. We will be releasing advisories and statistics against our vulnerability findings in open source web applications, particularly in the ASP and PHP space shortly, so watch this space!
A couple of really interesting issues arise from the use of Open Source applications. While it is an important way to place useful applications into the online space, it is apparent that the degree of security scrutiny placed on the web applications is insufficient. In the main, contributors to these projects are focused on the application functionality and features, and security issues do not get the level of attention or audit that is warranted. A part of cause for this has been a lack of compliance or automated tools that can provide a quick return on the problem; that was one of the driving forces behind our developing CodeScan for our own use in automating some of the source code analysis.
The other really interesting issue that arises from the Open Source community is that a high proportion of development teams globally use “cut and paste” techniques to include functionality into their own application development. This has the advantage of enabling relatively quick software / web application developments to occur, but the other edge of the sword is that it may also duplicate potentially insecure code. How many people really perform source code audits against the code they are importing to determine that they are not actually importing vulnerabilities into their application at the same time as they bring in functionality?
Tools and Trends
Proactive vs. reactive; bugs need to be squashed in development. There are a number of vendors, including ourselves, that are moving away from the more traditional reduction of exposures and issues and more into the prevention of vulnerabilities being developed in systems in the first place. Application vulnerability testing can be applied to production applications, and additional tools implemented to control the visibility and exploitation of software vulnerabilities (intrusion detection / prevention, application aware firewalls, patch management systems, etc), but these are all still reactive in nature. If you are trying to fix software security issues, why not develop it to be secure in the first place? Security At The Source is the only true proactive measure that is going to result in secure systems over time. Addressing security at the source code level with static compile time code inspection systems is likely to be one of the big emerging trends over the next 2-3 years.
Security policy driven testing is also emerging as a requirement trend. We are continuously seeing drivers in being able to test easily for standard and custom security policy in web application development. Why should customers put up with code that doesn’t even comply with either their own or their developers’ policies for secure development?
There is also a big trend away from static application testing prior to production toward incorporating security testing and compliance measurement throughout the software development lifecycle. There have been a number of studies done that identify this specifically, and the cost for repair of bad code in production systems has been proven as high.
“It is about 40-100 times more expensive to fix problems in the maintenance phase of a program than in the design phase.”
There is also a strong tendency now to look at how security can be designed in, and tested as a part of the overall software test environment. Why not start testing code security at the prototype phase? Problems and issues associated with the design are a lot easier to pick up and rectify at that stage. We have seen (anecdotally) significant reductions in the cost of early security testing vs. testing at the “ready to go live” state. All too often the testing at the end will anyway result in a “we will fix the security in the next version” or similar lame excuse, with the security issues either not being addressed, or being exploited in the production state. Not great, but the situation definitely is improving.
Compliance management is probably going to be the next “big” driver for software compliance. Already we have seen more and more onerous regulations controlling auditing and reporting (Basel II, Sarbanes - Oxley) and privacy (Gramm - Leach - Blilley, HIPAA, Australian Privacy Act), ISO 17799, and commerce (MasterCard / Visa AIS program) are driving the adoption of comprehensive IT best practice guidelines, which have as a core the reliable audit and measurement of compliance with minimum baselines. As an example, the MasterCard SDP looks to testing of OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities in bespoke or custom web applications. This trend is likely to continue, with compliance driving a number of behavioural changes within organizations and software development.
Final Summary
Today, in this environment, existing vulnerability scanning methods, including manual reviews, are just not going to cut it. Right now, as security professionals, we worry about these problems. As the new and emerging laws settle into established practice, look for security to embed itself firmly with quality assurance staff, application designers, and eventually the programmers themselves, to become more involved in managing software security and ensuring compliance.
Peter Benson is the CEO of CodeScan Labs, and Security-Assessment.com
CodeScan Labs is a sister company of Security-Assessment.com, and is firmly focused on software vulnerability research and subsequent development. Our flagship product is CodeScan Developer, which is designed for use by both developers and auditors in the testing of web application source code for security weaknesses.
http://www.codescan.com
http://www.security-assessment.com
Further resources available at http://www.security-assessment.com/tech-1.htm
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Most people spend their energies looking for a great website designer, but often neglect to choose a good website host. For most people they start examining their web host carefully only when their website goes offline because their web host goes down. While we cannot prevent such an occurance totally, it will help if you choose a good website host. This article covers three reasons why you should spend some time looking for a good website host.
This article covers three reasons why you should spend some time looking for a good website host.
1. Lost of sales
Any business owner knows that when your website is down, you lose sales. It’s that simple. Spending time looking for a good website host with minimum downtime is important as it can allow you a good rest at night knowing that your internet sales websites is running like it should.
Mary an internet business owner had a problem with her web host and true enough the web site server went down and her ecommerce website also went down with it. To add to her troubles, she was running a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign with several Pay Per Click Search Engines like Google Adsense, Overture, Findwhat and she had to quickly disable all her ads until her website came online again. She later realized that she should have spent some time looking for a website host that was not only value for money but had a good reputation.
2. Lost of Advertising Revenue
Another business model online involves advertising and content related websites. These websites provide lots of free content but make money when people click on contextual and banner advertising on these websites. Some popular websites have many visitors a day and the loss of advertising revenue can be staggering.
Yahoo.com in a celebrated case was down one day after a massive Denial of Service Attack. Although it had nothing to do with a web host, we can all learn a lesson from this. If your website is advertising supported and advertising is your main monetization income stream then, you need to choose a website host that can ensure that it stays up and has a reliable connection to the internet.
3. Inability to grow your website
Another reason to choose a website host is that when most of us first startout online, we know nothing about web hosting features and choose the cheapest deal around. The problem with this is that the cheapest deal may not be the best deal and when you have a huge content website later and want to grow your website, you may find that your current web host is unable to provide the support for certain scripts.
John was one such internet business owner. He wanted to add a sql database for this new script that he was to get then the reality of the cost factor hit him. The web hosting company that he was using had only two plans and the difference in one extra website was to be $50. He later spent some time looking online for a better website host and migrated his entire network of websites to that web host. You may not be so fortunate, if your website is too large, sometimes it may be very difficult to migrate it to another web host. Thus you want to spend some time thinking about the long term growth of your website before you choose a web host.
In conclusion, choosing a web host requires some serious thinking as it can limit the growth of your internet commerce business. Hopefully the three points above have highlighted the importance of choosing a good web host and provided some examples of web hosts to avoid.
Best-web-host-directory.com
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directory with articles and directory listings of the best web hosting and website building companies online.
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A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don’t realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.
Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimisation and usability compatible? Aren’t there trade-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out (although I’m sure you can guess the answer!)…
1. Keyword research carried out
Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com), you can discover which keywords are searched for the most frequently and then specifically target those phrases.
Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site’s usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.
For example, you might decide to target the phrase, “sell toys”, as your website does in fact sell toys. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for, “buy toys” (think about it - have you ever searched using the word, “sell”, when you want to buy something?). By placing the phrase, “buy toys” on to the pages on your website, you’ll be using the same words as your site visitors and they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for more easily.
2. 200 word minimum per page
Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings.
In terms of usability, it’s also good to avoid pages with very little content. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed information. Don’t be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Web users generally don’t mind scrolling down anymore, and provided the page provides mechanisms to aid scanning (such as employing sub-headings - see point 6 below) it shouldn’t be too difficult for site visitors to locate the information that they’re after.
3. 100kb maximum HMTL size
If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HMTL file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it’s simply too big for them.
A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem, used by three in four UK web users as of March 2004 (source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intc0504.pdf). Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you’re looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!
4. CSS used for layout
The website of Juicy Studios (http://www.juicystudio.com) saw a six-fold increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:
The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
There is a greater density of content compared to coding
Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.
5. Meaningful page title
If you know anything about search engine optimisation you’ll know that search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.
A meaningful page title also helps site visitors work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.
6. Headings and sub-headings used
Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarise the content immediately below them.
Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don’t read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we’re after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier.
Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.
7. Opening paragraph describes page content
We’ve already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words or so on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it’s the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.
As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we’re after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it sufficiently describes the page content, should help us out.
8. Descriptive link text
Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say ‘click here’, search engines can’t gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, ‘widgets’ then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.
One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, ‘miserable failure’. So many people have linked to George Bush’s bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush’s bio appears top of the search rankings!
As web users, we don’t generally read web pages word-for-word - we scan them looking for the information that we’re after. When you scan through text you can’t take any meaning from the word ‘click here’. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.
9. Frames avoided
Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren’t as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can’t follow links between frames.
Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they’ll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site!
Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and bookmarking. Put simply, say no to frames!
10. Quality content provided
This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimised website, but it’s actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.
By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors.
Conclusion
Optimising your website for both search engines and people needn’t be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should easily be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.
This article was written by Trenton Moss. He’s crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.
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Users visit (or should visit) your site for a given reason, and that reason has a name: content. Though the are mutiple types of web content (graphics, multimedia, downloads…) we will focus on the predominant one: textual content. In any case, the following definitions are also applicable to any other kind.
WHAT IS GOOD CONTENT?
Good content can be defined as that which attracts users and keeps them coming back to your site.
In addition, content is effective if it leads visitors to an specific goal. Always that goal exists, of course; for many people, attracting and keeping users will be more than enough. But effectiveness is another story and will be told another time.
Getting back to the main point, we can say that web content is good if it is:
THE IMPORTANCE OF FEEDBACK
Every different person is attracted to very different things, so “good” content as defined before is completely subjective. Hence the importance of knowing your users.
Ask their opinion (directly or indirectly) and find out what they really need from your web site, so you can adapt your content accordingly.
Original article published by Javier Garca: Basics: Adding content to your web site in Monetizing the Web. Read more articles on Web content.
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Users visit (or should visit) your site for a given reason, and that reason has a name: content. Though the are mutiple types of web content (graphics, multimedia, downloads…) we will focus on the predominant one: textual content. In any case, the following definitions are also applicable to any other kind.
WHAT IS GOOD CONTENT?
Good content can be defined as that which attracts users and keeps them coming back to your site.
In addition, content is effective if it leads visitors to an specific goal. Always that goal exists, of course; for many people, attracting and keeping users will be more than enough. But effectiveness is another story and will be told another time.
Getting back to the main point, we can say that web content is good if it is:
THE IMPORTANCE OF FEEDBACK
Every different person is attracted to very different things, so “good” content as defined before is completely subjective. Hence the importance of knowing your users.
Ask their opinion (directly or indirectly) and find out what they really need from your web site, so you can adapt your content accordingly.
Original article published by Javier Garca: Basics: Adding content to your web site in Monetizing the Web. Read more articles on Web content.
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