Beginning ASP.NET 4.5: in C# and VB

Chapter 17

Personalizing Websites

What You Will Learn in This Chapter:

• Details about the Profile feature that ships with ASP.NET
• How to create and consume a user's profile in a website
• How you can recognize your users and how to serve them customized content
• How you can access the profile of other users of your site

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter on the Download Code tab at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118311809. The code is in the Chapter 17 download.

There is only one thing that beats good content on the web—good personalized content. In the era of information overload and the huge amount of competitive sites, it's important to know your visitors and understand the possibilities you have to present them personalized content. With a good personalization strategy, you can create a website that lives up to your users' expectations by presenting them with exactly the data they are looking for. Personalization is useful for many different scenarios. For example, on a sports site, you use personalized content to highlight activities from the user's favorite team. On a site that deals with programming, you can personalize content by showing users examples in their preferred programming language(s) only. On a news website, you can let users choose one or more news categories (World, Local, Sports, Business, Financial, and so on) and target the content you show them based on these preferences. You can take this one ...