Customizable Websites - The Definitive Guide
By Abid Warsi2008-02-06
When you should add customization to your website
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Whether users would want to be able to customize your website depends on 2 main factors.
Firstly, do users visit your site frequently? Customizing a web page takes time - users are far more likely to invest this time if they spend enough time on your site to make customizing it worthwhile. If users set your website as their browser's homepage or start page then this is positive indicator. The following are types of sites users are likely to want to customize:
- Portals e.g. Yahoo!
- News e.g. BBC News
- Social networking e.g. Facebook
- Search engines e.g. Google
Secondly, would your site be able to add interesting content and would it make sense to have this content on your site? There's limited usefulness in only being able to move existing content around your homepage. Users will be much more motivated if they're able to add interesting content or applications and remove what they don't like.
However, don't have addable content for the sake of it. It makes sense for iGoogle to turn itself into a portal but that wouldn't work for every website.
MyYahoo! is a perfect example of a site users would likely want to customise. Millions of web users visit it several times a day and for many their browser loads Yahoo! automatically when opened. It's also packed with content and users will benefit by being able to change the content layout, choose which content interests them and set various preferences.
Conversely, Redbridge Council, which has a customisable homepage, is much less suited to customization. Most of Redbridge's residents won't visit their council website very often and will likely feel that the little time they spend on it doesn't justify customizing it. Nor will it make sense to add content from other sources. They likely won't visit it often enough for it to make sense to add frequently changing content such as national news headlines. Also, most residents won't want to use a council website as a portal or make it their homepage.
Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» Types of customization
» Benefits of adding customization to your website
» Disadvantages of adding customization to your website
» Tips for adding customization to your website
» When you should add customization to your website
» Conclusion
