Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Using Content Providers

In This Chapter

Using riddles on your site Enticing your visitors with brainteasers Placing quotations on your site Setting up a postcard shop on your site Adding weather information Updating news and more with RSS

Fresh content keeps people coming back to a Web site. No matter how great your site, how wonderful your prose, and how fabulous your graphics, few people will visit your site over and over again just to see something they’ve already seen.

If your Web site provides a repeatable service, like automated translations or HTML validation, you can get away with leaving your site alone. For the vast majority of sites, though, if you can’t give your visitors new material from time to time, you’ll lose ’em.

It’s a treadmill that you can never get off of; you’ve got to keep updating your site’s material, or your site dies. All Webmasters want high-quality content for their Web sites, but generating that content isn’t easy. Fortunately, plenty of people crank out all sorts of stuff that you can use.

Whether you know it or not, you’re already familiar with this sort of material. Your daily newspaper typically consists of some locally produced material and lots of items from content providers. The comics, most columns, horoscopes, and many of the articles in the newspaper come from people who don’t work for that paper. The news and information companies that do this sort of thing are latching onto the Web as the newest and best market for such ...