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>Some on the business side want all access to the site to go through the
>home page. They don't want people to be able to bookmark various
sections
>in the classified ads and access them directly.

How do they propose to go about doing that? 

Many readers of print products flip through the pages backwards --
from back to front. That must really bug this same crowd :-)

If you *could* force people to enter your site through a single path,
you'd be creating some of the obstacles people go to the Net to
avoid. If someone's really only interested in your "Markets" stories,
why not allow them to go straight to that section's stories with a
single click? Same with "Farm Living", "Opinion," "Production," or
classifieds' "Tractors for Sale." You can still tease other
destinations on your site from those pages, perhaps with even greater
success.

For example, when someone hits your news index:

  http://www.producer.com/docs/news/news.html

You have no idea what they're looking for. But if you had a "Farm
Living" section "front," you could begin to guess what kinds of
readers are gravitating there. Then, on your "Farm Living" pages you
might link *directly* to the Antiques, Clothing, Hobbies, etc.,
sections of your classifieds. Create a separate section for your
"Production" stories and link directly to stuff like the Farm
Machinery items in classifieds.

If you intend to sell ads on your site, your business people should
be thinking of increasing the *quality* of ad impressions rather than
just raw numbers. Funelling everyone through a "home" page really
only reduces the quality of visits to such a page because you don't
know why those readers are there -- other than that they're on their
way someplace else in your site (assuming they're not there by
mistake altogether after having done a "bestiality AND sheep" search
at AltaVista).

If one could access just classifieds' "Tractors for Sale" directly,
that would seem like primo real estate for ads from a machinery
company, since it's very likely readers there are in the market for
some equipment. The fact that a "home" page typically has the most
traffic doesn't make it the best place for advertising, as it is
often seen to be in the print world.

Note: Technically, I guess you *could* force people to go through a
"home" page if your site were completely -- including URLs --
dynamically generated. All requests for URLs not generated in real
time by the CGI application(s) would be bounced to your home index.

Bad idea, I think. If you're going to put effort into a dynamically
generated site, better to use the technology to *target* readership,
not homogenize it.

Regards,
SRB



 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 Steven Bonisteel                                      P. 613.531.4764
 Kingston, ON                                          F. 613.545.9148 
 steveb@typecast.com




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