Website private areas... Feedback requested please
Discussion
Hi all,
I am after a bit of feedback and your thoughts on websites that have private/sign in areas.
My business is a very exclusive one and for VHNW clients. I am writing a website at the moment that has the choice of making all its pages public, or reserving some of the pages in a private area whereby you will need to apply for a userid and password.
A very open question: what are your views on this approach to reserving pages in this way?
Cheers
DMN
I am after a bit of feedback and your thoughts on websites that have private/sign in areas.
My business is a very exclusive one and for VHNW clients. I am writing a website at the moment that has the choice of making all its pages public, or reserving some of the pages in a private area whereby you will need to apply for a userid and password.
A very open question: what are your views on this approach to reserving pages in this way?
Cheers
DMN
Might be way off base, but this doesnt sound attractive from a customer perspective. I'd prefer my experience to be seamless (without having to submit a username/password half way through).
Can you get them to login (and that's a battle) even if their initial bits are in the public space?
Can you get them to login (and that's a battle) even if their initial bits are in the public space?
The technology should allow you to do either as the site moves forward. Then the decision as to what you should lock down will revolve around how you intend to monetise the site, and how you intend to encourage your users to register. Registration without some form of profiling means that you will simply have some email addresses and a sense of privacy within the site and nothing more. If you capture some meaningful profile data (the nature of which will depend on the site and the target audience) then you have a much better opportunity both to provide the user with interesting functionality (think Amazon recommendations) and perhaps more importantly something rather more interesting for any "advertisers" you might want to attract.
I say "advertisers" in quotes because I use it as a catch-all for "people who want access to your readership" rather than the traditional and simplistic description of people who want to place banners on your site.
For example, let's say you have a potential audience universe of 200,000 and let's say your site is all about classic cars. You want to generate some revenue from a car parts supplier and you have two possible pitches:
1. I can put you in touch with 200,000 random people
2. I can put you in touch with 250 people who I know drive the make and model of car you specialise in
You can no doubt guess which is the more compelling proposition. But I won't give you my personal information unless there is some good reason for me to do so. So here is where the "paywall" comes into play - I want to access your content enough to make me give up some of my personal information. Murdoch plans for his paywall to be purely cash-based; however the content-for-profiles model works very well particularly with a specialist audience.
There are many other ways to get people to register - access to interactive functions, ability to vote in polls, ability to use a forum, ability to network with peers - the list goes on. However I would think hard about what information you want to garner from your visitors - typically you only get the one chance to gather valuable information and that is on initial sign-up.
ETA - we define users as either "anonymous", "registered" or "profiled" and then group them into more specialised areas.
I say "advertisers" in quotes because I use it as a catch-all for "people who want access to your readership" rather than the traditional and simplistic description of people who want to place banners on your site.
For example, let's say you have a potential audience universe of 200,000 and let's say your site is all about classic cars. You want to generate some revenue from a car parts supplier and you have two possible pitches:
1. I can put you in touch with 200,000 random people
2. I can put you in touch with 250 people who I know drive the make and model of car you specialise in
You can no doubt guess which is the more compelling proposition. But I won't give you my personal information unless there is some good reason for me to do so. So here is where the "paywall" comes into play - I want to access your content enough to make me give up some of my personal information. Murdoch plans for his paywall to be purely cash-based; however the content-for-profiles model works very well particularly with a specialist audience.
There are many other ways to get people to register - access to interactive functions, ability to vote in polls, ability to use a forum, ability to network with peers - the list goes on. However I would think hard about what information you want to garner from your visitors - typically you only get the one chance to gather valuable information and that is on initial sign-up.
ETA - we define users as either "anonymous", "registered" or "profiled" and then group them into more specialised areas.
Edited by miniman on Monday 19th April 17:30
-DeaDLocK- said:
Just a thought: content in protected areas is not indexed by Google (unless you engage clever skullduggery).
Clever skullduggery will only see you drop down the listings as Google has not become the giant it is by being outsmarted by a few tricks 
The right approach is to present a synopsis / teaser of the full piece of content within a page that has carefully constructed, SEO-friendly titles, tags, outbound links and so forth and, crucially, is hand-crafted to give a good summary of the content with all the relevant keywords included. What I mean to say is, an automatic "first 100 characters" is not good enough. For example: http://is.gd/bzG3h
miniman said:
Clever skullduggery will only see you drop down the listings as Google has not become the giant it is by being outsmarted by a few tricks
The kind of skullduggery I was referring to was the sort where the web server parses the full content for Google's spider, but denies it to regular visitors. Of course what would then happen is that some of this content is then publicly available through Google's indexing, but disabling caching can mitigate this to a large extent. The other loophole is where visitors spoof the spider, but the nature of the OP's enquiry doesn't really indicate that the security of the content is absolutely critical.Edited by -DeaDLocK- on Monday 19th April 22:43
Thank you so much for your replies and your insights, it is much appreciated.
The nature of the material I want to provide in the password protected area is more of a 'how to' nature, as well as personal accounts and experiences, as well as access to a booking calendar.
On a slightly different note, has anyone come across these chaps before. For what they offer, they seem to be remarkably good value:
http://www.webcreationuk.com/
For what I had planned, it would cost me about £1200, which seems good value... unless you know otherwise!
Once again, thanks for your help, it is much appreciated.
The nature of the material I want to provide in the password protected area is more of a 'how to' nature, as well as personal accounts and experiences, as well as access to a booking calendar.
On a slightly different note, has anyone come across these chaps before. For what they offer, they seem to be remarkably good value:
http://www.webcreationuk.com/
For what I had planned, it would cost me about £1200, which seems good value... unless you know otherwise!
Once again, thanks for your help, it is much appreciated.
drivin_me_nuts said:
miniman said:
I think they have missed a zero off their price.
I thought their prices were surprisingly reasonable. I can only presume that they make their money out of economies of scale.That webcreationuk site seems like they have a set of templates then slightly alter those to fit the spec of the client. Will be cheap for a reason. Also, do UHNW people actually use websites for forums/private members areas/that sort of thing?
That accounting website looks horrible.
That accounting website looks horrible.
Edited by bonsai on Tuesday 20th April 10:14
bonsai said:
That webcreationuk site seems like they have a set of templates then slightly alter those to fit the spec of the client. Will be cheap for a reason. Also, do UHNW people actually use websites for forums/private members areas/that sort of thing?
That accounting website looks horrible.
Valid point. They do, but for a very specific set of criteria including access to discrete information. Forums? probably not.That accounting website looks horrible.
Edited by bonsai on Tuesday 20th April 10:14
"How to" type articles can certainly be put behind a registration, but I haven't seen anything to indicate why you want to do this? I can only assume that this is to allow you to generate income (either by a fee, or selling subscriber details).
In any case, to condense the issue down: it will work if registering for your site is deemed worth it by your customers for the benefit they will receive. Remember that your customers have not seen your content, so no matter how good it is they can only know if it is worth registering for either by personal recommendation or by 'indication' from some other non-protected content (e.g. a teaser). Even where there is no fee, I would suggest that you don't underestimate the disincentive that registering can be, especially for something that is purely one-way information (as opposed to a website that allows people to ask questions, for example). That means that you will need to work hard to ensure that the value of the hidden content is perceived to be very high. Information is cheap and many consumers expect it to be both free and freely accessible. But if your information is rare/high quality enough AND your customers know that, customers will go to the effort.
Of course, access to content isn't the only incentive for registration - other websites do this by giving extra functionality (like search, or commenting, or forums, for example).
In any case, to condense the issue down: it will work if registering for your site is deemed worth it by your customers for the benefit they will receive. Remember that your customers have not seen your content, so no matter how good it is they can only know if it is worth registering for either by personal recommendation or by 'indication' from some other non-protected content (e.g. a teaser). Even where there is no fee, I would suggest that you don't underestimate the disincentive that registering can be, especially for something that is purely one-way information (as opposed to a website that allows people to ask questions, for example). That means that you will need to work hard to ensure that the value of the hidden content is perceived to be very high. Information is cheap and many consumers expect it to be both free and freely accessible. But if your information is rare/high quality enough AND your customers know that, customers will go to the effort.
Of course, access to content isn't the only incentive for registration - other websites do this by giving extra functionality (like search, or commenting, or forums, for example).
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