Website Personalization

The Fall 2005 Summit theme was personalization. In his keynote address, Tony Byrne strongly recommended lightweight steps toward full personalization, since few websites have specialized content for individual visitors and personalization is costly in programming/development resources and slows website performance. But he did offer some strong advice.

Seth Gottlieb suggested this was customization, not true personalization where individuals can alter the behavior of the website to their preferences - "My CM Pros".

See Tony's keynote here

Since the CM Pros website can recognize members who have previously logged in by detecting a cookie in the browser, we have the opportunity to do some limited website customization. We can serve the top right content block conditionally, with one version for visitors, another for members.

Visitors will still see the content block Join CM Pros, urging them to Join Now!

But members will not see that redundant message. Instead, a new Member News block will give them direct links to member benefits, like the Member Directory and a new Member Discounts page.