Hide Content from Guests?
Should a website owner hide content from guests?
This question has been popping up more and more in conversations so I have decided to address the issue. When creating a website, the most fundamental of basics website management is “Content.” If you don’t have content then there is nothing for users to interact with on your personal website. When a prospective user finds your website and begins to browse the various pages within the website, they are looking for content that is satisfactory and entertaining and interest catching. If that content does not exist then there is no reason for anyone for that matter, to visit your website. And then if that content does exist but is hidden from guests view, then even if it does exist but hidden, then the guests would have no idea they are being kept from content that they wanted to view, which is why they browsed to your website to begin with, was because a search engine picked up on key words that it indexed from one of the web pages due to one of its crawlers (also known as bots, or spiders) when the potential user searched for those same keywords in a search engine, such as Yahoo or Bing.
Every once in awhile a certain subject will interest me, or something I see on a documentary will catch my interest and after the tv show or lecture is over with, I would want more information on the subject. In that case, I would log on to an internet browser and begin searching, using keywords that I can think of, and typing them into a search engine on a web browser. That search engine will search the internet for all the websites that utilize those key words I typed into the search engine browser and it will organize those websites in the web browser search list by certain criteria such as, Relativity, Date Indexed, Content Creation Date, Popularity, etc…
Usually the first page of websites the search engine pulls up are the most relevant to the search criteria that you typed into the search box via key words that interested you into searching for more information about a particular subject. So when you find a website that interests you, you click on it to visit the web page that has the most relevant information pertaining to your search criteria. If someone visits a website that has the content but is requiring them to register or take a survey or something similar, it is usually a big turn off to that user since they don’t want to necessarily take the time to register, confirm an email address, log in, etc…all they want is to read the content that caught their attention in the first place.
If your website is already a well established website on the internet with tons of traffic coming in and links from other websites linking to your website, then it may be beneficial for you to require a membership or something similar for users to participate in, in order to interact with the content that exists on your personal website. There are advantages for a websites’ creation and content creations and setting up permissions for prospective users that are intended to interact with a particular websites’ content. If making all your content freely viewable to all guests and users alike is beneficial for your websites popularity, then hiding that content and requiring a membership might be a bad idea. Then again, if you already have plenty of useful content and users who are guaranteed to interact with the content across the web pages of your personal website if they are registered and logged in, then it may not be a bad idea to require some sort of basic membership in order to gain access to the website content.
Discussion Topic: Hide Content from Guests?
