Chapter 13: Keeping Sites Fresh and Engaging 335 Randomized favorite quote The ever-popular random link A fantastic example of a frequently changed feature can be found on Dunstan Orchard sweblog. He has taken a number of images that reflect the local time and weather conditions on the farm where he lives in Dorset, England. Using PHP and other technologies, each time a visitor goes to the page, the image reflecting current time and temperature conditions is displayed. Figures 13-3 and 13-4 show the effect. Figure 13-4: A subsequent visit shows rain showers. Secret #219: Add a Weblog Weblogs (also referred to as blogs )often offer so many rich features that adding them to a site whether personal (see Figure 13-5) or related to career, profession, or campaigns, (refer to Figure 13-6) is usually a very good idea for a number of reasons. You might wish to add a weblog for the following reasons: Keeping a weblog for regular news and updates keeps your site active and your content brand new. With the proliferation of weblogs on the web, site visitors are coming to expect these features, and it puts a contemporary face on your work. Blogging software offers a number of site features including commenting systems (discussed later in this chapter), specialty linking features, and calendars that can be used effectively to bring current information to your users.
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334 Part III: Designing Sites for Long-Term Sucess Secret #218: Provide Random or Frequently Changed Features Being able to randomize links and images on the web is something we ve been able to do for a long time. Web enthusiasts and designers will remember one of the first major implementations of randomization Yahoo! s random link feature. Later, Google emerged with its impossibly simple interface and an I m Feeling Lucky button. This feature thrills many users because you simply never know what you re going to end up with. Adding randomization can be very simple. Common approaches to creating random items on a page include the following: Using a proprietary application and scripting such as .NET Using PHP randomization scripts Using Perl scripts Using JavaScript cross ref Refer to Appendix B for more information on where to find resources for .NET, PHP, and Perl. For more information on JavaScript, see Chapter 12, Spicing it Up with Dynamic Content and Rich Media. You can randomize different types of content, too. Consider the following: Different graphic image each time the page loads Figure 13-3: A visit to Dunstan s site shows it being daytime and sunny.
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Chapter 13: Keeping Sites Fresh and Engaging 333 Useful Information and Applications Site Type Ideas Specific Site Examples Portal Portals benefit from a wide range of information and applications, including everything listed here for other site types, news headlines, horoscopes, this-day-in-history features, and so on. For an excellent portal example, see Excite, at http://www.excite.com/, which not only offers a lot of great information and useful, fun applications, but also allows you to customize exactly what you see on your home portal page. Children s Games for fun, interactive educational presentations, word-a-day for vocabulary building. KidSites, at http://www .kidsites.com/, is a colorful, upbeat portal site with approved content for kids. Lots of ideas for value-added, helpful offerings can be found here. Figure 13-2 shows an updated weather feature on a Real Estate agent s web site. This feature adds not only warmth, but demonstrates to visitors that the content is being kept up-to-date and customized for them, ultimately creating a better relationship between the site and the visitor. Figure 13-2: Updated local weather information makes this site more visitor-friendly.
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332 Part III: Designing Sites for Long-Term Sucess Finally, on the low end, simple applications using PHP, Perl, and even JavaScript can provide you the ability to greet visitors and make them feel more welcome. note For more information on application technologies, databases, and programming languages, see Appendix B, Overview of Application and Database Technologies. Secret #217: Offer Useful Information and Applications Along with regularly updated, quality content, you should consider adding appropriate information to your site that will be of use to your visitors. Table 13-1 provides a list of some site scenarios and the types of information you might wish to provide to make your site more engaging and useful to your visitors. Table 13-1: Types of Information You Can Add to Make a Site More Useful Useful Information and Applications Site Type Ideas Specific Site Examples Real Estate Agency Local time and weather, neighborhood tracker application, mortgage calculator. A site with numerous features to enhance home buying can be found at http://www .realtor.com/. Auto Customize your car feature, payment calculator, feature comparisons between cars of a similar class, online car-care tracker. For an example of a customization application on an auto site, see the Build Your Own feature on Mercedes Benz USA s web site, at http://www .mbusa.com/brand/index.jsp. Financial Stock feeds, up-to-the-day interest rate feature, broker tracking, bill-pay features. A great example of a financial site offering numerous applications and tools for its site visitors is the Motley Fool, found at http://www .fool.com/. Health-and-Beauty Self-help quizzes, randomized health and beauty tips. Emode (now known as Tickle ) is a popular health, beauty, and community-related site with many rich and engaging features for site visitors. Find it at http://web .tickle.com/. Inspirational/ Religious Quote of the day feature, religious history quiz. Beliefnet is a widely used religious and inspirational web site with incredibly useful information and applications for those seeking to learn more about world religions and spirituality. Find it at http://www.beliefnet.com/.
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Chapter 13: Keeping Sites Fresh and Engaging 331 Figure 13-1: Even a simple, personal welcome can add warmth to your site. A number of scenarios could conceivably benefit from the implementation of a complete, high-end or custom-developed personalization system, as follows: Your web site offers recommended items, and those items are stored in a database. You need to clearly demonstrate return on investment (ROI) for the site. Personalization products can assist with high-level tracking of customer behavior, so ROI can be tracked more efficiently. Your site offers a large number of products (500 or more). Your site is an e-commerce site. Your site offers customer support. You are running a portal site. You are running an auction site. note Personalization technology at this level definitely raises concerns about consumer safety, identity, privacy, and security. The Personalization Consortium is an international advocacy group promoting the advancement of personalization technologies but with a strong emphasis placed on ethical practices and responsibility. Visit the Personalization Consortium at http://www.personalization.org/. Technologies used in personalization run the gamut. You can choose from full-on server packages with included personalization features from such heady providers as IBM, Oracle, BEA Systems, Broadvision, and Vignette. In the mid-range, Java and open source languages and products are emerging to contend with the high-end.
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330 Part III: Designing Sites for Long-Term Sucess There s nothing like a static Web site to disappoint a site visitor. How do you keep visitors coming back to your site, staying at your site longer, and spreading the word about how effective your site is? There are simple ways to achieve this, and while many Web designers already tap into many of these approaches, there sa lack of consistency in how they do it. This chapter offers clear, straightforward approaches to keeping sites lively. Secret #216: Use Personalization I rarely use the United States Post Office anymore. Instead, I prefer to pay a little extra for mail and shipping services and go to a privately owned shop such as Mailboxes, Etc. and others of its kind. Why pay more?Well, snail mail and shipping remain an important part of my work, and I want more personal service than the crowds and confusion U.S. post offices usually provide. When I walk into my mail shop now, I m greeted personally by the owner or one of her employees. They all know me by first name, and I receive a much more personalized and quality service as a result of this smaller environment. Like the U.S. post office, many web sites can appear cold, crowded, and confusing. Upon arriving at the site, you may wonder, What am I doing here? This is especially true if the site offers products or services that could easily be available elsewhere. Personalization has become a cornerstone of making sites fresh and engaging. Especially appropriate for any kind of portal or community web site, being able to greet users personally and provide personalized services has become all the rage. If you question that, just think about the services being made available at shops such as Amazon: Favorites lists, personal recommendations, one-click shopping, and (my personal personalization favorite) wish lists. All of these features customize the site to my needs, which makes using the site very easy, fast, and interesting. note A report from Jupiter Communications (http://www .jupitercommunications.com/) in 2001 shows that personalized sites can see annual revenue increases of up to 52 percent. You can add personalization using several different approaches. Personalization on the scale of Amazon can cost millions of dollars to implement, so obviously adding complex personalization features is no easy choice. For those with deep pockets and good rationale for adding complex personalization, you can either purchase out-of-the-box solutions or hire programmers to custom-design your own solutions. For those sites with a more moderate budget, open source software can provide more affordable solutions. Finally, for small sites, adding some simple personalization features such as a personalized greeting as a user enters the site can be very inexpensive to implement yet provide a bit of warmth for your visitors (see Figure 13-1).
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Chapter 12: Spicing It Up with Dynamic Content 327 digital storytelling can spice up a site would be to use multimedia and storytelling as a means of telling the corporate history. Just think of the fascinating stories that could be described about Ford Motor Company, Coca Cola, or the American Civil Liberties Union. One case study describes how the Kansas City Symphony put together a program for local schools to understand the issues surrounding war. By reading stories enhanced with music and images via a Web site, students are able to become very engaged in the history and emotion of war, leaving a far more lasting impression than just having read pieces of history in plain text. By adding digital storytelling of this nature to a site, it becomes a destination of interest, a means to educate and inform, and ultimately a means whereby you can establish trust, understanding, and camaraderie with your audience members. note For more information, history, methodology, and a sampling of case studies, see the Center for Digital StorytellingWeb site, at www.storycenter.org/. Summary From adding a day and date welcome to including a story via multimedia, you can make anyWeb site spicier using a range of solutions both old and new. By following a few simple changes in terms of approach, you can widen your horizons and the enjoyment of your site s visitors by making your scripts and media accessible, usable, fun, and practical. The next chapter, Keeping Sites Fresh and Engaging, shows you how to keep people engaged and involved in yourWeb site, creating a loyal, lasting, and always interesting relationship between you and your audience.no
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326 Part III: Designing Sites for Long-Term Success Secret #215: About Digital Storytelling It stime to switch out of the heavy issues and into something a little more creative. Digital Storytelling is a movement that began in the early 1990s with the late Dana Atchley and several other co-founders. The idea was to use digital art forms to tell stories from life. The point was to go deeper into a story than just the verbal using digital imagery, audio, video, and other multimedia to express the story in a multifaceted, highly personal, and very creative way. Interestingly, as the Web emerged, many digital artists interested in storytelling came to the Web. Like-minded groups of Web designers and artists using the Web as a means of expression came together at such gatherings as South by Southwest Interactive, various digital storytelling festivals, and events related to other conferences and gatherings even Burning Man, an extremely popular artist and artisan gathering held each year in the Nevada desert. Before long, a philosophy emerged that has resulted in rich opportunities to apply the concepts within digital storytelling to both personal and professional Web design applications. The most overt application of these ideologies is the Weblog itself, which is often a very obvious form of digital storytelling, using images and media as well as words to convey the process of a life (see Figure 12-20). Figure 12-20: Weblogs are a form of digital storytelling. But digital storytelling can come into play to make professional sites more engaging, interesting, and compelling content. By tapping into dynamic technologies and rich media applications, great stories can be told on what might typically be a dry and boring Web site. Every corporation, organization, industry, government, or education institution has interesting historical, political, and social issues associated with it. A way that
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Chapter 12: Spicing It Up with Dynamic Content 325 Of course, you can always just link directly to your video, as in the following example: View the Hey Ya Charlie Brown Movie Adding video via the object element can be done as you set up your audio in the last step. The difference is going to be in the file name and MIME type, and the support concerns. You must make sure you include the proper file name and file type:
Heya Charlie Brown! This is a standards-based approach and will work in some browsers, but it will not work in IE, which is a big problem. Fortunately, some workarounds are available. tip To learn an approach that nests object elements to achieve better support, read Standards Compliant method to add QuickTime movies to pages, which covers other forms of video as well, at http://realdev1.realise .com/rossa/rendertest/quicktime.html. Figure 12-19 shows an embedded video in Mozilla using the standardized approach. Figure 12-19: An embedded video in Mozilla.
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