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Knowledge Centre

Having content on your site extends beyond just telling visitors about your company and its products or services. By adding a little bit extra, you can create what experts like to call “stickiness” – the ability to keep people viewing for longer, and thereby enhance your reputation, and give a fresh look to your site on every visit. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add free content from a third party, in the form of news headlines, sports results or anything relevant to your business.

One of the most important things to consider before you opt for free content is its relevance. If you run a business selling football kits, most of your visitors will be football fans and will therefore be interested in the latest football headlines. If you’re a double glazing company, it will probably just annoy them. Think  about whether new content will add unnecessary clutter to your site.

There are a number of portals linking to free “feeds” of rolling headlines on a variety of subjects. Freesticky is one of the largest, though it has a US bias, while News4Sites and Worldpress.org are both good for general and localised news. NewsNow offers more highly targeted UK-specific content for a small fee. 

Weather information is always popular, particularly if you are encouraging people to come and visit you. Both The Weather Channel and the BBC Weather site offer free feeds; these are useful if you’re providing maps, for example.

You may need a Web designer on-hand to help integrate some of the code into your site, but increasingly, content providers are making codes easier to use – always try feeds out on a test page before you put them live to see how they work.