Static Content
A guide to static content.
Intro
Static content is content that you put up and it doesn't change. Most beginners' web sites will be made up mostly of static content. These are usually biographies of people, interviews with people, tutorials on different subjects, glossaries, and factual things.Static content will have a particular role on your site. It will serve mainly to fill out your page with more broad sub-topics. For example, if you have a page about psychology then I think it would be important for you to have a glossary of psychology terms, but this wouldn't be part of the focus of the site. With all the possible fresh, updated content that visitors can see (academic studies, news articles about pscychology, reviews of new books about pscychology) you wouldn't want to prominently promote static content on the most prominent space on your site. For example, you wouldn't want a big link that said "Check out our Psychology Glossary!". Visitors would instantly realize you don't have any fresh content and form a low opinion of your site and probably won't come back. The link to the glossary would probably be somewhere on your drop-down menu or at the bottom of a side menu.
| | Advantages: |
 | no technology skills required. Static content won't be dependent on having a script to run or be driven by a database or a server-side application. This means you won't have to be proficient with web page coding to put up tons of static content. This is why I say that most beginners' sites will have mostly static content. |
| It is realiable. With static content, you don't have to worry about your database having problems, or content loading times, or a script not working. These pages will be easily displayed without any problems (other than your overall server downtime). |
| You only have to write it once. One of the best things about static content is that you get big returns on your time. If you write static content that is very popular but doesn't change then you can enjoy high traffic for these pages for years without having to invest any additional time. For examples, if you write tutorials then these tutorials can be used for years by many different users. |
| It helps to fill out your page. Putting in static content will make your site more broad. Having more content on your page makes it more likely that a visitor will find something he likes. Also, bigger sites, overall, sometimes look more legitimate because you can tell the webmaster invested a lot of time developing the site. |
| It increases the number of pages that will come up in Google searches. You will be surprised which of your pages pay off the most from an SEO standpoint. Sometimes the less-popular pages will give you more traffic if you rank much higher for those search terms. |
| | Disadvantages: |
| For the most part, it is not sticky - Most of your visitors will only need to read it once and then not read it again. For stuff like biographies, interviews, and glossaries, your visitors will not want to bookmark it to come back. |
| Static content tends to very standardized - The content itself will tend to be the same as similar content on other sites. For example, your biography of a particular person will not be that different from another site's biography. |
| When you do have to update static content it will take a while to re-write - This is not that much of a big deal if the jobs are small - refreshing your static content may only have to be done a couple of times a year or so. But if you run a site that has tons of static content that, for some reason, needs to be changed or updated, then it will be a big project. |
| There is less competitive advantage - Since static content tends to be standardized and there isn't any coding involved then it means any webmaster can put up static content. Even if you create unique content then there will be nothing to stop your competitors from copying your idea and there is a good chance that they will. This erodes the long-term advantage of your site. |
Examples
Examples of sites that work well are about.com (a tutorial and encyclopedia site), imdb.com (the best movie information site in the internet), retrosheet.org ( a site that has incredible amounts of historical baseball information), archive.org (a site that saves old versions of web pages), whitepages.com (phone numbers), IRS.gov (they have all their forms online).
An example of a site that doesn't work well is citytown.info which competes in the area of town information sites with better sites like epodunk.com. Another example of a site that doesn't work well is yellowpagesnationwide.com. This page is basically an online yellow pages. But this kind of site already exists so I don't know why anyone would go there - especially when Google Maps will map all the yellow pages entries for you.
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