Web Content 2008: The Challenge of Dynamic Content is Generating It

By Michele Beaulieux | Published Jun 17, 2008

At the Web Content 2008 conference today, John Lovett of Jupiterresearch was a knowledgeable and personable presenter in a tough time slot, and I have to say I was suffering from information overload at the end of the day. Nevertheless, I got some good tidbits.

As a B2B marketer working with smaller companies, I didn’t think his topic, “Adding Dynamite to Dynamic Web Content,” was relevant for me. So, it was good to hear him acknowledge that dynamic content is tougher to implement in business-to-business situations.

He did say that implementing dynamic content, which he defined as “Content changes on a web page in response to different contexts or conditions,” doesn’t have to be a monumental project; you can start small with something as simple as image galleries. So, that was optimistic.

The big issue, of course, for companies implementing dynamic content is generating the content. The vertical that most obviously uses dynamic content is the media: generating content is their business after all. Also, travel, financial services and retail.

One example was Hotels.com who has moved from expert evaluations of hotels to user-generated content, which users find more valuable anyway. And, of course, user-generated content is a great way to overcome the issue of limited resources.