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Generating Fresh Content

There are many reasons to keep adding new or fresh content to your web site. In most businesses and organizations, things change. It may be that the day-to-day activities of your organization interest your clients. Maybe potential clients can gain information from your site, leading to an appreciation for you over your competitors. Or maybe you just want to keep your site updated so it will rank well in the results of search engines.

Whatever the reason, we'll talk about a few different areas of your site that can be kept updated.

Portfolio

If your work results in distinct creations (ie paintings, logos, web sites) rather than identical items or services (t-shirts, toys), it would benefit you to keep a portfolio. Show pictures of your work, from multiple angles if your work lends itself to that sort of thing.

And keep it updated! At T&S Web Design, we do our best to update our portfolio each time we complete a project. If the client allows it, that is.

It may be that your clients want your work for them kept confidential. Even then, they may not mind if you just list them as one of your clients. If they're a big name client, the name alone may be enough to entice others.

Of course, even if you sell items or services that are all identical, you can still get client feedback. You can ask clients specifically for feedback, or you might just pull it out of emails clients have sent you. Just make sure you have the client's permission to use what they sent you.

Register for a special 19 page Free Report on PDF that discusses article marketing and how real content will help you keep your site from getting banned! You'll also receive the highly acclaimed Article Marketing News Newsletter! It's free! Sign up today!

Calendar

It may be that you make appearances or have some sort of list of appointments that all clients would benefit from knowing. This would be true for a public speaker like Scott Ginsberg and for a charity with distribution dates like UR Special. If it's true for your company as well, then you need to keep an up-to-date calendar on your web site.

Blog

Currently one of the more popular methods for communicating on a regular basis with a large group of people online, a weblog can be a very effective way to keep your site updated. If you are reading this article online at www.GetASiteOnline.com, then you are reading it on a weblog .

A weblog can be a number of things. It can be a periodic newsletter, where you keep people up to date on day-to-day happenings. It can be a series of articles. It can even be a series of simple news updates.

FAQ

Many web sites start their life with a Frequently Asked Questions page. All too often, this page is never really updated. If you ever get new questions, it is likely that they will be asked more than once. Add the questions to your FAQ page.

At the very least, keeping a FAQ page up to date can cut down on you having to answer questions multiple times. After all, that was probably part of its original purpose. That, and it will make it easier for visitors to your site to find out answers to specific questions.

Pictures

If you have a section of your site that is dedicated to pictures, you should definitely keep it updated. But even if you don't, you should periodically update the pictures throughout your site. After all, if people go to your site and see new pictures, they are that much more likely to re-examine the rest of the site.

Keeping your web site up-to-date with new information can be time-consuming, but if you are updating it while keeping your current and potential clients/customers in mind, it is well worth the time.

Related: Blog Making Money - Google Duplicate Content

RSS Underground Featured Article Author Box

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained web site for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a weblog with free web site advice for small business owners.

Separating the Content from its Presentation

The main idea behind the concept of separating the content from its presentation is to allow web site developers a useful framework to develop their web site giving them the ability to change the web site's appearance whenever they like without needing to redo the content structure. This article will explain the rationale behind separating content from presentation.

Don't get me wrong, there isn't just one method for implementing this concept. More than that, since the introduction of technologies such as CGI, ASP, and PHP that allow web developers to generate dynamic web pages, a lot of companies have found creative ways to develop their web site applications using this concept as their foundation.

Over the past few years, the internet community has been trying to create a set of standards for creating web sites. A new technology called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets has been introduced. There is nothing actually new in the way CSS handles a web page's presentation. CSS allows the developer to define a style for each html tag element. This is similar to the method developers (programmers) used in the old days when they attached a variable to each html tag defining its style. The major difference is that CSS style definitions can be interpreted by most of the existing browsers available while in the older method the dynamic web page engine performs the interpretation.

The internet standards organization W3C has encouraged the use of CSS by enhancing its ability to control the web page's look and feel. New style options have been added to the CSS specifications that have not been added to the HTML description language. There's no doubt that this was a smart move. It's forced web developers to use CSS to achieve an attractive web page that also supports the principle of content separation. Unfortunately CSS did not find its way into the internet mainstream easily because of compatibility issues with most web browsers. These days CSS is widely supported by most of the major web browsers, while CSS2, an enhanced version of CSS still has serious compatibility issues.

Obviously, the separation of content from its presentation deals not only with the styling aspects, but also with browser compatibility issues. The styling aspects were the first to be handled by web developers and web designers. As the complexity of information technology (IT) systems become increasingly more difficult to maintain, the internet community is looking for a solution that will become a standard so that content can be easily be managed. One goal for this standard is to define a "language" that IT systems can "talk" with each other and exchange information. Large corporations have historically used many different software platforms in their networks to conduct business. Internet based applications can provide a single platform that can act as an intermediary between all of these different systems and allow communication between them.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been adopted as a standard to present the content itself. OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a close relative of XML that has been widely used by financial institutions who have been using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems to transmit orders and invoices over private networks, intranets and the internet for several years.

The need to present the content in a standard way that separates it from any design elements was so urgent that for the first time in software development history all the three major players (SUN, IBM, and Microsoft) actually agreed with each other and XML become a standard almost overnight and was adopted by many content providers and news agencies.

Yet the concept was not fully implemented. CSS handles the styling aspects while XML handles the document content. What about the webpage layout? New web sites are been published each day by thousands. Every day millions of new web pages are being added to the internet's global database. Webmasters have found that changing the page background color or the font color might not be enough to keep their web site fresh and polished to compete with other new web sites. However, changing the web site layout can sometimes involve a lot of effort because it involves modifying the web page source code. XSL was introduced to solve that issue. Consider XSL a set of rules that can describe a web page layout. Combine it with XML (and optionally with CSS) you will get a valid html file.

XSL is very similar in its mechanics as any other dynamic web page generator. Beside the fact that XSL is platform independent, its biggest advantage is that it can be processed on the client side. The web server sends the client the content using XML format and the layout definition using XSL format. By doing that, the load on the web server's CPU is reduced allowing it to perform other tasks more quickly. However, XSL was not adopted by all the major web browsers. So unlike XML, XSL has not found its way to the market easily.

Before you run back to your desk and start redesigning your web site according to these magnificent standards, you should be aware that those technologies are really not needed most of the time. In fact, using them unnecessarily can cause performance problems. CSS usually will not cause your system to slow down. Just try to keep your CSS file as small as possible. Many web developers maintain large CSS files with lots of unused style definitions. Deciding to work with XML is a serious decision. If your web site generates dynamic web pages supported by databases like MySQL, adding additional XML functionality will definitely reduce your web site performance. Sometimes you won't have a choice and will need to upgrade your hardware to maintain your web site's performance. There is no rule of thumb for this issue. The decision should be based on each system and its engineering demands. My advice to you is to think two steps ahead. Try to predict what kind of future services your web site will be providing. Plan your web site properly at stage one and save yourself lots of effort later.

Related: Sample Content - Identical Content

RSS Underground Featured Article Author Box

Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.
WebDesigners123 connects the Freelance Web Designer with Webmasters who need their services.
If you would like to read more of Warren Baker's writings, visit our Website Design Articles page.

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