It may seem rather simple, but organizing your web content can be rather tricky. You know all about your company and services, but what’s the best way to present that information on the web?
First, think about your audience. Let’s say you have an online store. Most people will come to shop - consumers, retailers and wholesalers. You may also have a small group of companies looking to advertise or to sign up for an affiliate program. If your products are unique, the media may want to find press releases. Not all of these people will use your website in the same way. So, the very first step is to create a list of audience types.
Next, determine goals for each audience. For shoppers, you want them to order. But you may also have other goals for them, such as registering as store members or signing up for online sales circulars. For the media, you’ll want them to contact you for interviews, or download press releases. So, think carefully about the ideal end result of each visitor’s interaction with your website. Create an action item list for each audience type.
With your audience list and action items in hand, go through your existing content. List your articles of interest for each particular audience. Strive to arrange your content logically. An intuitive structure may jump out at you. If not, think about arranging your content by topic or chronological order. Perhaps your content would be more compelling if you present it as cause and effect or problem and solution. You may also find that you need to write new content to support your action items.
Now that your content is in order, remember to associate action items with specific content pages. Don’t just stick action items on every page. All too often, visitors are bombarded with possibilities and options that they’re really not interested in. What’s the down side? They can’t focus long enough to see what really pertains to them. By limiting the number of action items you list on any given page, you’ll help your visitors to focus on the goals that are important to your business.
When you’re done, you’ll have a user friendly information architecture that your site visitors will appreciate!
If you already have a website that you’re happy with, but would like to add apartment listings to it, consider the following.
You can hire a web developer to create a program for you, that will allow you to add, edit and delete apartment listings. Or you can sign up for a service, such as Apartments-Apartments.com. Let’s compare.
Hiring a web developer:
Pros:
You get a custom content management system that displays your apartment listings with exactly the information you want to display.
You may be able to connect your current software to your web site to upload your listings automatically.
You have full control over how your apartment listings are displayed.
You get pretty comprehensive listings, and may not even use all of the options available.
Your apartment listings appear on your own web site and on their partner network.
Your own website will have more in-bound links from a website with related content.
You have the ability to upload images for your listings. They will be re-sized for you.
You’ll have access to tools, such as:
Quickly email links to specific listings to people you’re working with
Copy and paste HTML ads for use in other web sites.
Copy and paste a bit of code to display your featured listings on your own homepage or on other websites.
Cons:
The look and feel of your apartment listings can be customized, but with limitations.
You may not need or want all those bells and whistles.
What if I just want to upload my apartment listings from my website to third party apartment listing websites?
Each web site you want to link up to will have its own requirements, if they even accept automatic uploads. And even though it’s not mentioned on the apartments-apartments.com web site, you can request to have your apartment listings uploaded from your website’s database to their website. However, this is not included in their normal membership fee. You’ll have to pay a one-time fee to have it set up.
All in all, you be the judge. What makes sense for your business?
If you’re interested in having your apartment listings automatically uploaded to apartments-apartments.com, call MVP Web Solutions at 978-697-1955. We’d be happy to discuss your options with you.
Have you ever thougt about serving different content to people in different countries? It’s possible with IP Delivery. Basically, you program your website to read the IP address of the browser request and generate content for the user. But be careful, there are some basic guidelines you should follow.
This video by a Google rep makes the topic very understandable.
Here’s the definition for Google Gadgets straight from Google:
“Gadgets are web-based software components based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They allow developers to easily write useful web applications that work anywhere on the web without modification. They are defined using a declarative XML syntax that is processed by a gadget server into a format that allows them to be embedded into various contexts: standalone web pages, web applications, even other gadgets. A context into which a gadget is embedded is called a gadget container. The container is responsible for managing the gadgets’ layout and controls, as well as for supporting various functionality on behalf of the gadget. A gadget may be a simple widget, a reusable component, or a full-blown application, possibly utilizing or communicating with other gadgets.”
For non-programmers, what this means is that your web developer can take engaging content from your website and turn it into a neat little tool that can help drive traffic, and hopefully revenue, to your site. How?
Let’s say you have a database of really useful information. You know your site would be a hit if you could just get the right people to visit it. A Google gadget can display excerpts from that database. And you can publish your gadget on Google’s network. That means Google users can find your gadget. But it also means that other websites can act like a container, putting your gadget on their sites.
How does that build web traffic and users for you? You can have links in the gadget that go directly to your site (which is not unlike RSS feeds that you see on personalized pages like My Yahoo! or iGoogle). Even more impressive, you can embed the sign up process to your application right into the tool. So visitors can join your services without ever visiting your site directly.
Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg and is not intended to be a definitive guide, my any means. This short article is just a primer to get your creative juices flowing. What do you have to offer your visitors? How can you make a gadget out of it? How can that gadget be used by different types of websites? Maximize your development dollars by considering Google Gadgets into your web site’s future.
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