KEEP YOUR WEB SITE UP TO DATE
One key aspect of Web site ownership is the ongoing task of keeping your site current. There are two reasons you want to keep your Web site up to date:
- People will get bored and stop coming back if nothing ever changes on your site.
- Search engines might drop your listing. That's right! Some search engines check to see if your site is old and musty -- if it is, they delete you.
Here are some good ways to get people to come back to your site time and time again:
- Post a monthly newsletter about your company or your industry
- Add a blog, bulletin board, or live chat to your site
- Add an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to automatically give people updates when they occur
- Give away something for free (a report, a sample, and so on)
- Run a monthly contest
Syndicated Content
One place you can go to get some fresh content for your site is FreeSticky . This site is a content syndication service that distributes a broad selection of written, graphical, audio, and video content from almost 1,000 sources to a vast and diverse network of more than 200,000 Web sites. Just sign up, paste some code into your Web site, and you're in business.
Affiliate Programs
Another way to keep your site up to date, promote it, and make some additional money on the side to boot, is to join one or more affiliate programs. For example, if you join an online bookstore's affiliate program, every time someone buys a book as a result of a hyperlink from your site, you get a small percentage.
When you sign up for an affiliate program, you're given an ID and some HTML that contains that ID embedded in it. You add this information to URLs on your site. The site you're affiliated with may ask you to display a banner or button announcing your relationship with them. When someone clicks the links you've created and ends up buying something at the remote site, it's cash city for you (maybe).
The focal point of affiliate programs is LinkShare.com , as seen in Figure 6-4. Notice the wide selection of programs.
Figure 6-4: LinkShare.com.
Each of these companies will supply you with one or more types of links to their sites. Some of these will be text hyperlinks and some will be banners. The affiliate site will provide you with HTML code to insert into your Web pages, depending upon what kind of link you want to set up.
You may choose to run affiliate links as banners on the top or bottom of your page, or use them to highlight products related to your industry, or recommended by you or your colleagues.
Wrap It Up
In this course, you learned to design an effective Web site, use a Web design tool to develop it, find an appropriate ISP to host it, use multimedia and interactivity to spice it up, and effectively promote your site. With hard work and a little luck, you'll have a great first Web site up and running soon -- if you don't already.
It takes a lot of effort to thrive on the Web. One thing you can do is stay informed, which means finding out everything you possibly can about the business of the Web. To that end, here's a list of places you can go to keep up with your reading:
But before you go, complete your last assignment and quiz, and stop by the Message Board one last time to share your thoughts and discoveries -- and find out what your classmates are up to. Good luck with your Web site!
