What do I mean? OK, assuming you have a website with some very useful reference material on it. You do, don’t you? Content is king. And you get lots of visitors … (OK, that’s a whole other article.) Well, your visitors might wish to save that information for later.
They can do this in various ways. They could send the page to themselves by email, they can copy and paste the text. You might even provide them with a print-friendly version or offer to deliver it to them by autoresponder. All great, but….
There are bound to be a number of people who will simply save your page as a file, because that is the simple option. Not to steal it, but to refer back to it.
OK, also assuming that if the information is good, the design is too and that you will have correctly coded all your internal links as just pagex.html and not http://www.yourdomain.com/pagex.html (If you do the latter, it slows things down while your visitor’s browser goes right back out on the net again …)
But, that is exactly what I am going to suggest that you do for your one most prominent link. Pick the title or logo, something that sticks out like a beacon at the top of each page. For this use the full, external link back to your domain’s home page http://www.yourdomain.com/ and in the link title or ALT text of the graphic also include www.yourdomain.com
This way, if your visitor has saved your page onto their hard disk, when they refer back to it eons later, they will be able to see easily and quickly just exactly where they got it from. They will be able to come back for more information, order your product or service …
It will also serve to deter petty content thieves who would otherwise think, “Oh, I cant remember where it came from so it must be public domain” – just like the real world, you’ll never stop the pros.
Beware scripts which you can use to insert the page location on your pages. Whilst on the www, they will give your page’s address correctly as http://www.yourdomain.com/pagex.html Once they are on someone else’s computer, they may not work.
This is also yet another reason to have good and meaningful titles to your pages, (as well as making sense for both site-specific and external search engines) as likely as not that will also be the file name under which your visitor will have saved your page.
Call it *Secrets revealed – how to sell profitable widgets in 10 easy steps FREE* and they are much more likely to click on their saved file – and remember why they saved it – than if each and every page of your site is called JimBobWidgets.com
On the other hand, there may be any number of reasons why you would NOT want people to save your pages at all. Site, copyright and design theft has become an increasing problem, in which case this method can still be used to help identify files that you otherwise protect and encrypt.
Copyright 2003 Pamela Heywood
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