As the Internet grows ever larger, a few things keep your
customers returning to you day after day. One, of course, is
the excellent product or service you provide. But with many
products, you're only one of perhaps dozens of vendors
online offering identical items at identical prices. Once your
customer figures this out, you may lose him.
The key to keeping them at your site, though, is to offer a
little more. And the best extra you can offer is continually
fresh content. People browsing are hungry for information,
and they'll stay with you as long as you can provide it.
It's hard work to keep fresh content up all the time. But
there are several emerging technologies that can help
automate this task by allowing you to assembly-line your
web production: writing or preparing all your information
perhaps one day a week, then releasing it gradually to the
Internet for you.
It's web automation, and it's going to be very important to
your business in the future.
Blogs: The Easiest Way To Keep Content Fresh
More and more businesses online are discovering the miracle
of blogs, daily or at least regular web journals that share all
manner of information with their readers. From your
personal life to pictures to crucial business information,
blogs are a great and simple way to provide your website
with content.
If you have ever used a blog, you know that most of them
have a time-release function. You can tell your blog when to
release a new post. You don't have to be at home or even in
the country in order to update your website; you can have
your blog do it for you.
And you don't have to just use blogs as blogs. Instead, you
can set them up to use as continually-refreshing articlepublishing
engines.
XML
Despite the hype of a few years ago, most small businesses
have not yet discovered the power of XML. Based on HTML
and related markup languages, XML allows you to create
documents that behave like database entries, or databases
that create documents for you. You note title, content,
author, and other pertinent data, set up an XML template,
and when you combine them you have a web page set up
cleanly and efficiently.
If you maintain your articles in this manner, one of your
fields can be a release day. Your XML engine, residing on
your web server, would check your XML markup before
creating a page. If the date is later than today's date, it
would not create that page. In this manner, XML can provide
you with a quick and convenient method for setting web
pages up to release on specified days – again, with little or
no interference from you.
Today you can find several XML programs that can perform
these functions for you.
Professional Web Publishing Automaters
If you use a large server to upload your web pages, you can
use a professionally packaged web publishing automater to
upload web pages in a timed-release manner. These
packages tend to be expensive and may be more powerful
than you need them to be, but they will do the job.
Overall
Your best bet overall is to use an XML package to create and
publish your website. Why? Because the expense isn't
outrageous, the web pages created are clean, and XML is an
emerging technology with vast potential. For instance,
because most online bookstores and libraries use matching
XML code, it's very easy for them to trade information. XML
is designed to put database information on the Internet,
plain and simple. Most businesses selling anything today use
databases to track their inventories and most of their
accounting. Take advantage of using XML for your business
website. Ultimately, you can use the same system for your
web publishing and online catalog creation as you do for
your inventory and ordering.
But for now, if you have all your articles in an XML system,
you'll be ahead of the game. It will be easy for you to
automate publishing, and when the search engines make the
(probably inevitable) move to preferential treatment for XML
tags, you'll be ready for them with your already-coded
pages.
