Although Anthony & Co., Inc. has been producing advertising specialty items for over fifty years, I’ve only been designing their web site for twelve. The last major update was done about three years ago, so I was glad to get a chance to redesign basically from scratch. The idea here was to create a simple, modern design that matched the look of existing brochures.

This web site was designed with PHP in order to utilize some of it’s advance features. A modular design was implemented to reduce redundancy. So, any element of the design that is repeated on multiple pages was written in a separate file that is added dynamically when the page loads. Also, the date in the copyright section of the footer automatically updates on the first of every year.

I used some CSS trickery to add some nice features. For instance, the main navigation bar knows what page is currently loaded and styles the corresponding link to let the visitor know what page they’re on. These particular links are also made non clickable since they lead to the same place. This should help to reduce confusion for the user.

Speaking of which, I wanted to make navigation very easy and intuitive. The product pages have a sub-navigation section with links to all product pages so all the products can be reached easily. These links, like the main navigation, behave differently depending on which page is loaded.

Each product page has a reminder about artwork specifications running vertically along the left edge. When clicked, the general information page is loaded. Also, to save the users from extensive scrolling, a “Back to Top” link was added to the lower right hand corner of all product pages.

Another cool feature is located on the main product page. Images of the products are laid out in a thumbnail gallery. Using CSS sprites and the JavaScript library JQuery, I added an animated hover effect that turns the image to gray scale and fades in a dark inner glow.

Check out anthonyco.com to see the web site for yourself.

There are many reasons to have dynamic content on your website, but the two most important are to increase traffic and to increase sales. Dynamic content will drive traffic to your site by helping give you a better ranking in search engine results. It can drive sales (assuming you’re selling something) or conversions by giving your visitors a better user experience.

What is dynamic content?

Back in the day, a hypertext document on the world wide web was a static file that looked the same to everybody who viewed it. If the page was lucky, it would be updated periodically, but for the most part, it just remained the same and collected virtual dust. If you’ve ever stumbled across a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated in 10–15 years, it probably hasn’t.

In contrast, a dynamic document on the world wide web can be customized for each user based on individual conditions or parameters. So it could show different content depending on the time of day, a user’s profile, operating system, browser or just about anything else.

Sometimes referred to as “conditional content”, it allows a more unique experience for the user with personalized messages and such. With dynamic content, the content is separated from the design and stored in a database. The content seen by the user is generated at the time of request at the server level using CGI, ASP, PHP, or a content management system.

How does it drive traffic?

Search engines, or more accurately, their search bots (also known as spiders) crawl the web and index the sites they find. They prefer dynamic content over static content because they figure something that changes often is more relevant than something that doesn’t. Therefore a dynamic page is more likely to ranked higher on a search engine’s results page and that means more traffic to the site.

How does it drive sales?

Even more important than its SEO benefits is the fact that human visitors like to see something different each time they visit a site. It keeps them interested. If it looks the same every time they visit, they are much less likely to return again. We humans also tend to enjoy an experience more if it’s personalized. For example, when a user logs in, they might see a custom welcome message that includes their name. No matter how it’s done, if a user has an enjoyable experience while using your site, they are much more likely to return again. They are also more likely to tell all their friends how great your site is, buy your widgets, visit your physical location or sign up for your service.

Using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., allows you to control your dynamic content very easily, hence the massive number of “blog” type sites that have popped up over the last several years. The key to this is quality not quantity. You must give your audience something that is interesting or important to them.

So, keep it fresh, keep it flexible, keep it dynamic.

In case you haven’t heard, WordPress is a personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL. In other words, it allows your site to be a dynamic, database-driven organism. So rather than having a couple static HTML pages sitting there getting dusty, your site can be built with PHP modules which can be combined in many different ways to dynamically generate the HTML page seen in your browser. I’ll get into why that is so important in future posts.

WordPress is licensed under the GPL and is an Open Source project. As an Open Source project, WordPress has managed to generate a huge community of users and developers. This has helped it grow from a small project in 2003 to a massively popular blogging platform in 2005 and now to a full blown Content Management System.

I’ve only been designing for WordPress for about one year, but in that time, I’ve seen drastic improvements as new versions were released. As I write this, version 2.8.4 is the latest and greatest. As a custom WordPress Theme developer, I have come to be intimately familiar with most of it’s features. I’ll be talking about WordPress a lot so check back soon or better yet, grab the RSS feed or subscribe by Email.