Tips Tricks & Pitfalls - Tour Page 3
Tip - Use SSI: If you are able to use SSI on your page, then an inclusion of today's date would help your surfers become more aware that the content changes daily. Using Today's Love Poem as an example, then a title which read Love Poem for May 21, 2004 would be a plus for your surfers.
Tip - DO Signup for Email List: A short monthly (or less often as-needed) email will tell you of new daily offerings, planned site outages, and/or changes to your daily content items. If you don't sign up for this list, you won't know what's happening. Your privacy will be respected and neither your name nor email address will be given or sold to a third party.
Tricks: Modifying the codes to suit your site is most definitely recommended (see previous page on this tour). HOWEVER, webmaster tricks and attempts to defeat the display of links in the plopped content are forbidden and are an illegal violation of copyright. Enough said.
Pitfall - Placement of Content Too High on Your Page
Because this is javascript, your page will stop loading if zdaily.com is not available. (While zdaily.com is up more than 99.9% of the time, internet crowding may make it unavailable perhaps 1% of the time.) Therefore, it is recommended that you place this plopped content low on the first screen of information that your surfer sees. Thus, your surfers will have a lot to see and do if the plopped content is not available immediately. For an example on zdaily.com of such lower-on-the-page placement, look at the syndicated news headlines. OR to avoid this problem entirely, place the plopped content pretty much by itself on subpages with your ads/banners on these subpages.
Tip - High-Traffic Pages: If you expect that your page will get 500 or more pageviews every day, why not consider using a program to update your page once a day using the data from zdaily.com which is available every morning by 2am eastern time? Then your page will never stop loading because zdaily.com is unavailable.
Pitfall - Webmaster Overexpectations: Adding this daily-changing content to your site can be part of a much larger overall strategy to build a repeat-customer base, but by itself it will not likely produce a large traffic jump. In my experience, there is very rarely ONE thing that will produce a lot of repeat traffic. Instead, it seems a matter of continual additions and improvements for the surfer that builds the traffic. Webmasters, including this one, keep hoping for a magic traffic bullet; such magic bullets are rare indeed! Next Stop on the Tour = Grab the Code and Go
Daily Content For your Site - Tour (please read ALL)
Tour Page 1 - Overview
Tour Page 2 - Today's 17 Content Areas
Tour Page 3 - How Various Sizes Look- Suggested Modifications
Tour Page 4 - Tips, Tricks, & Pitfalls
Tour Page 5 - Grab the Code & Go