Banners on Your Content Managed Web Site

If you are going to attract and retain viewers (and hopefully customers) to your web site you need to not only ensure it has what the viewers want, but that they can find, and find out about, what it contains.

A content managed web site has the potential to grow quite large. Some of my customers have sites with hundreds and even thousands of pages accumulated over a period of years. Others of course have sites with large numbers of products and the description pages for those products. Your site may not start out all that large, but you need to be prepared to give your viewers information about what it contains and why they should visit other parts than the one or two pages they've found themselves.

This is where the additional aspects of the content managed system come into play. In the case of glFusion, the CMS I use the most, this takes the form of using things like banners and tags and additional menus, and putting them together in a fashion that presents the rest of the site to the casual viewer so they stay longer and dig deeper.

The banners module for glFusion, written by Lee Garner, is almost a mini version of the OpenX advertising software that I use to host advertising for my customer sites. It allows the inclusion of a graphic banner, HTML, or javascript into various places in the site, governed by "weight", date and time as well as topic and whether a story is featured or not. It can be worked into the templates from other plugins so that banners can show up almost anywhere.

In the simplest example I've used the banners function to add internal advertisements for David Ingram's live video program to the CEN-TA tax site. The banners are at the top of each page currently, as well as on the right side top of the featured story, where the top story of each page is always "featured" (a setting in the theme of the site). These ads are simple HTML pieces, a table that defines the width and some text in Red and Black. Later we'll put together some graphics versions of these but for now we're testing the wording and placement for best effect.

The great thing about the banner module is that it will present one of a set of banners randomly. If you create several/many for the same spot, the banners show up based upon their "weight" (a number from 1 to 10 where 1 is low priority, 10 is high, and default is 5) - so viewers will likely see something different each time they visit the site or open a different page.

This randomness keeps your site fresh and hopefully inviting - and allows you to present different aspects of your web presence to viewers who might otherwise skip directly to a particular page because that's what they found in Google - then leave (bounce) immediately. Your "time on site" statistics will get better as your viewers read more and more pages and get more of an idea of what it is they might need/want from you.

richard

Tag: banner random glfusion advertising time on site pages viewed statistics impressions