Looking for a way to attract more attention to your website? Offer a fresh face and new content on a regular basis and you'll find people will check back to see what's new and you'll have a tool to measure what attracts and what doesn't. Here's how to do it.

Your website homepage is your front door through which online browsers come to visit your business. Static, never-changing content is no more interesting to a returning visitor than a book they have already read. To keep your audience captivated and coming back you need to make your home on the web inviting and interesting.

Present a Dynamic Home Page

One way that you can present changing home page content is to design ten to twelve unique pages with different content and then rotate them every month. Take a couple of weeks to design different ideas and images. Create page promotions that include a message that is timeless or that has a seasonal or timely announcement such as "Holiday Specials." When you consider different features for your home page and when it should be placed you're forced to look closely at at your marketing strategy over a one year period. This will save you a lot of time since you then won't have to think about your content through the year. It also allows you to plan your offers and gather the necessary content.

A web developer can put your home pages on a rotating script or use an automatic timer. You can then rotate your home pages to highlight a new tip every month or to promote a featured product. The home page of your website is much like the front cover of a magazine. People want to see a home page that has different photos and content at least every month, preferably every week. You won't want all of the content of your website to be featured on the page as this will overwhelm your website visitors. So choose one or two features to highlight each month. The rest of your website content should be well organized within the rest of the pages of your site. When you're ready to update your home page you simply grab content from your internal pages. This way you're not having to create new content. You're just reorganizing your existing content so that it feels new to your visitors.

Don't Change Your Home Page Too Often:

Even though you want your website to be new and dynamic you also don't want to change it too often. People take comfort from their favorite websites and want them to be familiar. If you change your home page too often or too much you may create confusion or give people the feel that someone else has taken over your site. You could also compromise your positioning in search engines. So maintain some consistency.

When you make changes to graphics or content it shouldn't make a major change to the way your website looks and feels. Regular visitors should be able to find the same information that they've always found on your home page and in the same place. As a rule, the headers and navigation tools on your page shouldn't ever change without a complete redesign and announcing that to your visitors. Change content and images with other content and images while maintaining the sites original functionality. Home pages that are consistent lend a feeling of comfort to users. If your customers learn to expect consistency they'll also learn to rely on your quality customer service. If you're a small online business, gaining your customer's trust is your most important step to success.

The Benefits of a Flexible Home Page

A flexible home page lets you test your off line marketing efforts. Before you spend money on a magazine or newspaper ad you can test it out on your website. You'll be able to see how people react to the ad. It will let you determine which featured products attract the most interest. You can also determine which graphics generate the most attraction. Web analytics software (Google Analytics is great and free to use) can provide you with this type of information. It will help you obtain marketing data that is detailed and precise. You can see which graphics people have clicked on as well as what web page they were on just before they left your website.

Once you've mastered the technique of updating your home page, while at the same time keeping the core content the same, you'll be well on your way to recognizing the benefits of a flexible home page.

Here are the simple ABC's of web development.

A. Graphics

Graphics is very essential in web development because this is what visitors gauze your site if it is worthy of their time.

So what really makes a graphic to be effective?

First, the graphic should be small. Consider using images that are 10 to 12 KB per image because if you will use larger images, it will slow down your site.

Visitors to your site will likely to leave if your site takes too long to display so it is better that you use images that are attractive and easy to load.

Second, when it comes to graphics, you have to use images that have direct relation to your site. You would not display an image of Hollywood artist to promote the product you are selling, as this will cause confusion to your visitors.

Lastly, blinking graphics are not ideal in web development because blinking objects are really annoying and distract readers. More often readers leave web sites with excessive flash or blinking objects most especially when these objects hinder them from reading the whole web page.

B. Advertising

Advertising is lifeline of web sites and you have to handle them effectively to ensure success of your site.

When in comes to advertising, you have to remember two things, the number of ads and how related it is to your site.

The number of ads should be just enough to give room to other contents of your site. If they are overlapping contents of your site, then maybe that is why your site lags behind in web searches.

Next, you should only post ads that related to products or services offered. If they are related, your readers will likely to open the links to your ads but if they are not related the ads might not be opened.

In the end ads generate income but if they are driving your visitors away, then maybe its time to remove some of your ads and just stick the ones that are related to the content of your site.

C. Web Content

Content is also another essential factor in success of your site. It will be better if you have articles that your visitors can read on a daily or almost weekly basis.

Informative content will likely to increase your visitors as they will bookmark your site and then send your links to other friends and family members to invite them to visit your site as well. But for others to recommend your site, you really have to offer not just ads or graphics but rich and informative content.

For example, you are selling a product, it will be better if the site not just offer the products but also give tips on "how to-" like how to choose, how to use and where to buy.

Meanwhile, if you are maintaining a web blog, make sure that the site is readable and the topics being discussed are really interesting.

What is PHP?

PHP stands for PHP: HyperText Preprocessor, it is a server-side scripting language, and as the name goes, it is to create dynamic and interactive Websites for your visitors. Maybe you currently make your Websites in HTML? HTML alone cannot create dynamic Web pages, HTML is clearly defined as a static language, as it is always static and mainly is used for structuring (or styling, in some cases) a document (or a Web page, if you like).

What do we mean by server-side scripting?

You may already know, but HTML is a client-side language, so the browser translates the HTML code into "bytecode" that the computer can understand, and so the computer translates bytecode into what we can clearly understand, text, for example. Server-side scripting is a little different, a little bit more added to the story. As with PHP, server-side scripting languages have an interpreter inside a machine, that translates the code (in our case, PHP code) to HTML code (that the browser can understand), and then the same process will take place with the browser translating the HTML code to bytecode, and so forth. With server-side scripting languages, you don't need anything adding to your browser or computer, as the interpreter inside the machine that hosts the particular Website does most of the work.

What's the fuss with server-side scripting languages, then?

The thing that makes server-side scripting a must nowadays is because it can generate dynamic Web pages, but what do we mean by dynamic Web pages? Well, imagine you wanted to start a forum, and you used HTML. Okay, you used a form to submit the data and it is sent to your e-mail address, and you have to edit the static Web page every time you want a new post added. That, to me, would be the most annoying job of creating a Website. However, with PHP (or any other server-side scripting language, for that matter), can be completely automated, and you'd not have to edit your file even once! The thing that PHP does, is sends the form data to a different page, saves it in "pre-defined" variables (things that store a value), and using something called a "while loop" that continually loops all the posts saved in the Web page - and that's it! PHP stores the posts in a MySQL database (something that holds data, if you like, like member accounts, etc) and uses that as long-term memory.

But if we're talking about server-side scripting languages, what makes PHP different from the rest? Well, simply put, PHP is probably the best thing that has come into the server-side scripting genre. If you have heard about other scripting languages like Perl or ASP/ASP.NET, you'll come to find that they are extremely hard to learn from. Put it this way, the majority of Web developers that use ASP.NET, for example, are those who have come from a different programming background, like have known VBScript, or other languages that's in relation to ASP.NET, the same with Perl. The difference between PHP and the rest, is PHP is incredibly easy to learn, especially for the newbies towards this industry, and PHP has took several steps to ensure an easy introduction to those newbies to the world of programming. Let's do an example, lets see which is the easiest to understand, out of PHP, VBScript and Perl, by doing a simple "Hello World" program, that outputs text to a Web page:

PHP:

echo "This is some text that'll be shown in a Web page...";

VBScript/ASP.NET:

Response.Write("This is some text that'll be shown in a Web page...");

Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "content-type: text/html nn";

print "This is some text that'll be shown in a Web page...";

Okay, now I am not going to say things like "well, obviously PHP is the easiest to understand" - as obviously, we all have different preferences, but what I can say is, that they all do the same thing. Which seems the most logical to you? In my opinion, the two most logical ones for me is PHP and VBScript/(ASP.NET).

Now it's up to you which one you want to go ahead with, experiment which one is best for you, after all, we all have dfferent tastes.

Good luck!

Below are a few resources to get started with PHP:

# - w3schools.com

# - php.net

# - mysql.com