Presenting Content
Content is king. Content is certainly king if your business model is to publish content on the Web and make money from advertising with
traffic drawn by the content. Your first rule should be: Don't "dis" the king. In other words, don't do anything to distract from the content,
make it harder for surfers to find content they need, or make the graphics that frame the content too jazzy. In particular, if the graphics
seem too important, they will distract from the content.
A particularly annoying sin on content-based web sites is to use an animated splash page (Flash is the
tool usually used) to open the site.
Page and Site Design
These rules of content presentation can be put positively (rather than negatively):
It should be clear that the purpose of the site is to clearly present content.
Choose a name for the site, and titles and headers for the pages, that make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the site is to
present content, and (as a general matter) what that content is.
The design of the site should serve the purpose of presenting content.
Site design should be intended to facilitate navigation and frame the content: nothing more, and nothing less.
Specific content items and subject areas should be easy to find.
Provide multiple mechanisms for finding things: index pages, search boxes, site maps, subject areas, and so on.
Type should be legible.
Be careful to choose a readable font, in a large enough size, and background and foreground color combinations that are easy
on the eyes. It's hard to go wrong with black type on a white background. The reversewhite on blackis hard on the eyes, and
some combinations (for example, dark blue on lighter blue, are essentially unreadable).
Keep graphics simple.
As it happens, following the rules of content presentation I've outlined will serve you well with search engine placement.
But that's not the point of these suggestions here. The point is usefulness and transparency to site users. If viable content is presented in
an accessible fashion, then indeed "they will come."
If you are targeting your content specifically for Google's AdSense program (or a competitive contextual engine), you should also bear in
mind the following:
AdSense can't interpret images (except using captions, the value of alt attributed in the
images to a minimum.
You are likely to get more relevant ads if you keep each page to a single subject (and move tangential subject matters to
different pages).
Key concepts, words, and phrases should be clear by glancing at a page (see Chapter 3 for information about how to use these
keywords and phrases to optimize your pages for AdSense, Google, and other search engines).
1.4.2. Page Size
How much content should go on each site page? Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the answer is not too much, and not too little: just
the right amount of content.
It's in the interest of the site publisher to keep pages short, because the same amount of content spread over shorter pages makes for
more pages. And more pages on a site means more places for advertising, which in theory might mean more revenue.
In addition, more pages may mean more page views, implying better metrics to advertisers who don't
look too carefully.
However, if you break an article up into many short pages that a user has to click through, users will find it irritating and vote with their time
by frequenting the site less often.
The happy medium is to be natural about page length. The natural length for a content page is the content that will reasonably fit into a
maximized browser window without having to scroll.
Obviously, this is a rough, rather than precise, guideline since different browsers on different systems
will show different size pages.
Don't gratuitously break an article into multiple pages unless the article really is longer than a few browser-sized pages. Also, don't break
an article (even if it is long) unless there are natural breaks in the content. Anytime there is a new Level 1 header in an article, it's a good
sign that you could break to a new content page without the break feeling forced.
A related issue is to be careful about the width of your content pages. People will be looking at your web pages using a variety of
hardware, operating systems, and browsersthe most important variable being the monitor size. You don't want your readers to have to
scroll to the right because part of a content web page is off the screen. This is very bad form and may also obscure content advertising if it
is positioned along the right border of the page.
The answer is to design pages for lowest-common-denominator displays. In practice, content pages should be no wider than 800 pixels.
Pages 800 pixels wide (or less) should display without scrolling on most (although not all) computers; some displays are still only 640
pixels wide.
Separating Content from Design
When you create content web sites, it's imperative to use mechanisms that separate web page content from design. The purpose of
separating content from design is to let you:
Easily change the look and feel of a site without the change in overall site design having any impact on the content
Tweak positioning and other ad-related variables to maximize revenue without having any effect on site content
The simplest way to achieve these goals is to use includes server-side includes to position site graphics such as navigation bars. A
server-side include is a file that the server includes within another file (the inclusion is specified by a special directive). When you view the
HTML source code in a browser, you have no way of telling whether the main file was generated using includes or not.
Includes can also be used for advertisement code, such as that provided by Google's AdSense. By changing the code in a single include,
you can change the navigation bar or advertising parameters across all the content pages on an entire site.
Sitewide Changes to Styles
It's somewhat less important than the ability to easily do sitewide changes of advertisements and site graphics such as
navigation bars, but it's still nice to be able to perform sitewide changes of text styles. It is less important because leaving
everything as reasonably sized black text on a white background is usually just fine.
Style attributes can be set using a server-side include. Each content page then includes the include file, which contains
the styles for the content. Text styles can be changed on a global basis simply by changing the definitions of the styles
within the include file.
Another simple mechanism for doing sitewide font and font-size changes is to use an external style sheet to define the
fonts and sizes to use with various types of text (each content page references the style sheet). To effect a global
change, simply change the style definitions in the external style sheet.
Server-side includes work well to separate key design elements (and advertisements) from content, provided your content site doesn't
have too many pages and assuming that each page doesn't have a great many repetitive elements.
If many of your content pages are essentially the samemeaning they have the same elements but the value of the element differs from
page to pageyou should probably be using a templating system. Templates use special tags for the common elements, with the actual
content for each page that replaces the special tag specified, often using content stored in a database table. This means that an
appropriately written template file and one or more database tables can populate and create a whole raft of web pages, one for each row
in the table.
PHP is one of the most popular server-side programming languages available on the Web (most inexpensive Linux/Apache web host
services let you program in PHP without any additional configuration effort). You can find out more about PHP at http://www.php.net .
If you are a programmer, or have access to programming talent, you can create your own templating system using PHP or some other
language. But why reinvent the wheel? A popular PHP templating system, available for free download, is Smarty , http://smarty.php.net.
One of the great features about Smarty is that it caches a web page the first time it is generated from a template. Subsequent calls to the
page, unless the template or data have changed, open the cached pagemeaning the web site isn't slowed down by page generation each
time the templated page is opened.
A server-side include mechanism is a great start for creating a manageable content site andfrom a technology standpointwithin the grasp
This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to regis.ter it. Thanks
of almost anyone.
Templating is a good next step if you (or an associate) have the technologic sophistication and expect to be managing content sites with
thousands of pages. It's particularly important to use a system of templates if you expect to generate pages using data from a database.
Suppose you are managing a site with not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of pages. You have multiple authors, a team of editors,
and a workflow process to make sure that work is fact-checked, copyedited, and approved before it is published. In this case, you'll want
to use Web Content Management software (WCM) to provide content and design separation, template features, workflow management,
and more. Commercial WCM packages are available from vendors including IBM, FileNet, Interwoven, Microsoft, Stellent, and Vignette.
Not everyone recognizes that, in fact, blogging software such as MovableType and WordPress in effect
manages web content using special tags and a template system. You can use WordPress, in particular,
to manage pages that are not part of a blog. So if it's appropriate for your particular project, consider
creating a "Blogosite"a content web site managed by blogging software such as WordPress.
No matter what mechanism you use, it is vitally important to separate form from content so that you can easily keep your site design fresh
and tweak advertising positions.
Keeping Content Fresh
Have you ever tried to keep fresh-caught fish fresh? It isn't easy. Neither is keeping site content fresh. But sites, and their content, need to
stay fresh. It's not a big deal to change the overall look of a site by changing the graphic used as a navigation bar every month or sothat is,
if you've set the site up with server-side includes so that editing one file creates a global site change. But keeping content fresh is a trickier
issue.
Since search engines appreciate new content, some sites go to great lengths to provide content that appears new, for example, by
displaying syndication feeds on the site's home page. This may help with search engines (I have more to say on this point in Chapter 3),
but it doesn't do much at all for your primary audiencereal people.
Quality content sites need to strike a balance. You need to have a core of worthwhile reference material that doesn't change much. You
also need to keep content site fresh. As you plan your successful site, you should consider what strategy you will use to keep people
coming back for the latest and greatest. For example, do you plan to keep up with the latest events in a technology niche, such as a
programming language? Will you feature articles about current cultural events (which are constantly changing by definition)? Or will your
site present interesting blogs with frequently added entries?
