Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

Chapter 16. Personalizing Web Sites

There is only one thing that beats good content on the web — good personalized content. In the era of information overload and the huge amount of competitive sites, it's important to know your visitors and understand the possibilities you have to present personalized content. With a good personalization strategy you can create a web site that lives up to your user's expectation by presenting them with exactly the data they are looking for. Personalization is useful for many different scenarios: on a sports site you use it to highlight activities from the user's favorite team. On a site that deals with programming, you can personalize content by showing the user examples in their preferred programming language(s) only. On a news web site, you can let a user choose one or more news categories (World, Local, Sports, Business, Financial, and so on) and target the content you show them based on these preferences. You can take this one step further by sending them e-mail updates when a new article is posted in one of those categories.

However, personalization goes further than just storing personal preferences and adapting the content to these preferences. With personalization you can also keep track of other user details, like names, date of birth, visits to the site, items users bought in an online shop, and so on. You can then use these details to further personalize web pages, creating a closer relationship with your visitor.

In the Planet Wrox ...