Web
content is the textual, visual or aural content that is encountered as part of the
user experience on
websites. It may include, among other things: text, images, sounds, videos and
animations.
In Information Architecture for
the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville write, "We define
content broadly as 'the stuff in your Web site.' This may include documents,
data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web
pages, archived e-mail messages, and more. And we include future stuff as
well as present stuff."
Beginnings of web content
While the Internet began with a
U.S. Government research project in the late 1950s, the web in its present
form did not appear on the Internet until after Tim Berners-Lee and his
colleagues at the European laboratory (CERN) proposed the concept of linking
documents with hypertext. But it was not until Mosaic, the forerunner of the
famous Netscape Navigator, appeared that the Internet become more than a
file serving system.
The use of hypertext, hyperlinks
and a page-based model of sharing information, introduced with Mosaic and
later Netscape, helped to define web content, and the formation of websites.
Today, we largely categorize websites as being a particular type of website
according to the content a website contains.
The
page concept
Web content is dominated by the
"page" concept, its beginnings in an academic settings, and in a setting
dominated by type-written pages, the idea of the web was to link directly
from one academic paper to another academic paper. This was a completely
revolutionary idea in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the best a link
could be made was to cite a reference in the midst of a type written paper
and name that reference either at the bottom of the page or on the last page
of the academic paper.
When it was possible for any
person to write and own a Mosaic page, the concept of a "home page" blurred
the idea of a page. It was possible for anyone to own a "Web page" or a
"home page" which in many cases the website contained many physical pages in
spite of being called "a page". People often cited their "home page" to
provide credentials, links to anything that a person supported, or any other
individual content a person wanted to publish.
Even though "the web" may be the
resource we commonly use to "get to" particular locations online, many
different protocols are invoked to access embedded information. When we are
given an address, such as http://www.youtube.com, we expect to see a range
of web pages, but in each page we have embedded tools to watch "video
clips".
HTML
web content
Even though we may embed various
protocols within web pages, the "web page" composed of "html" (or some
variation) content is still the dominant way whereby we share content. And
while there are many web pages with localized proprietary structure (most
usually, business websites), many millions of websites abound that are
structured according to a common core idea.
Blogs are a type of website that contain mainly web pages authored in html
(although the blogger may be totally unaware that the web pages are composed
using html due to the blogging tool that may be in use). Millions of people
use blogs online; a blog is now the new "home page", that is, a place where
a persona can reveal personal information, and/or build a concept as to who
this persona is. Even though a blog may be written for other purposes, such
as promoting a business, the core of a blog is the fact that it is written
by a "person" and that person reveals information from her/his perspective.
Search
engine sites are composed mainly of html content, but also has a typically structured
approach to revealing information. A search engine results page (SERP)
displays a heading, usually the name of the search engine, and then a list
of websites and their addresses. What is being listed are the results from a
query that may be defined as keywords. The results page lists webpages that
are connected in some way with those keywords used in the query.
Discussion boards are
sites composed of "textual" content organized by html or some variation that
can be viewed in a web browser. The driving mechanism of a discussion board
is the fact that users are registered and once registered can write posts.
Often a discussion board is made up of posts asking some type of question to
which other users may provide answers to those questions.
Ecommerce sites are largely composed of textual material and embedded with graphics
displaying a picture of the item(s) for sale. However, there are extremely
few sites that are composed page-by-page using some variant of HTML.
Generally, webpages are composed as they are being served from a database to
a customer using a web browser. However, the user sees the mainly text
document arriving as a webpage to be viewed in a web browser. Ecommerce
sites are usually organized by software we identify as a "shopping cart".
A
wider view of web content
While there are many millions of
pages that are predominantly composed of HTML, or some variation, in general
we view data, applications, E-Services, images (graphics), audio and video
files, personal web pages, archived e-mail messages, and many more forms of
file and data systems as belonging to
websites and web pages.
While there are many hundreds of
ways to deliver information on a website, there is a common body of
knowledge of search engine optimization that needs to be read as an advisory
of ways that anything but text should be delivered. Currently search engines
are text based and are one of the common ways people using a browser locate
sites of interest.
Content is king
The phrase can be interpreted to
mean that - without original and desirable content, or consideration for the
rights and commercial interests of content creators - any media venture is
likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design
factors.
Content can mean any creative work, such as text,
graphics, images or video.
"Content is King" is a current
meme when organizing or building a website (although Andrew Odlyzko in
"Content is Not King" argues otherwise). Text content is particularly
important for search engine placement. Without original text content, most
search engines will be unable to match search terms to the content of a
site.
Content management
Because websites are often
complex, a term "content management" appeared in the late 1990s identifying
a method or in some cases a tool to organize all the diverse elements to be
contained on a website. Content management often means that within a
business there is a range of people who have distinct roles to do with
content management, such as content author, editor, publisher, and
administrator. But it also means there may be a
content management system whereby each of the different roles are organized
to provide their assistance in operating the system and organizing the
information for a website. A business may also employ various content
protection measures, which are typically technologies used to attempt to
frustrate copying without permission.
Even though a business may
organize to collect, contain and represent that information online, content
needs organization in such a manner to provide the reader (browser) with an
overall "customer experience" that is easy to use, the site can be navigated
with ease, and the website can fulfill the role assigned to it by the
business, that is, to sell to customers, or to market products and services,
or to inform customers.
Geo
targeting of web content
Geo targeting of web content in
internet marketing and geo marketing is the method of determining the
geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor with geolocation
software and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or
her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code,
organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP or other criteria.
Different content by choice
A typical example for different
content by choice in geo targeting is the FedEx website at FedEx.com where
users have the choice to select their country location first and are then
presented with different site or article content depending on their
selection.
Automated different content
With automated different content
in internet marketing and geomarketing the delivery of different content
based on the geographical geolocation and other personal information is
automated. |