Actually, I wrote up a page specifically on the advantages/disadvantages of the different kinds of content on my webmaster resources site. I'm posting the page below. If you want to see the site, then check the link in my signature.
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If there is one thing that differentiates great web sites from average or bad ones, I would say it is original and unique content. Even though design gets a lot of attention, I would rather have a badly-designed page with great content than a page with a great design and average content.
I don't mean to imply that you can't have both but you will most likely have to choose what areas to allocate your limited time to. I've seen high-traffic pages that I know get tons of traffic and make a lot of money but have bad designs. It's probably because the webmaster is spending so much time putting up content and marketing his site he hasn't had time to package it right.
Creating unique content is harder than it seems and takes longer than you think. If you are in the process of writing your content and you are cranking out two pages a day then I think you are doing pretty good. One page a day might even be a more reasonable estimate. This means that if you were to put up a site with 100 pages of original content then it would take you 3 months at 2 pages per day or 6 months at 1 page a day.
The key to good content is creativity. You have to think of ideas that haven't been taken advantage of on the internet yet. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if creativity is something you can acquire. Fortunately, there are some general principles you can use to come up with ideas. For one, you can go into some of the web forums dedicated to the the subject matter of your page and look at the different duscussions. Another is to look at your competition for new ideas. Creating a website completly based on originial content is basically no different than writing a book.
One thing to note is that out of the 6 main areas of being a webmaster (Planning, Coding, Creation, Content, Marketing, and Operations) the content section is the smallest section on this site. This is not because it is the easiest or the least important part of putting up a page. It is because choosing the subject matter of the content is going to be an individual decision that will be up to you. I can't tell you what to put on your page, I can only try to clarify the different types of content and some strategies to make your content more robust.
Static Content
Static content is content that you put up and it doesn't change. Most beginners' web sites will be made up mostly of static content. These are usually biographies of people, interviews with people, tutorials on different subjects, glossaries, and factual things.
Static content will have a particular role on your site. It will serve mainly to fill out your page with more broad sub-topics. For example, if you have a page about psychology then I think it would be important for you to have a glossary of psychology terms, but this wouldn't be part of the focus of the site. With all the possible fresh, updated content that visitors can see (academic studies, news articles about pscychology, reviews of new books about pscychology) you wouldn't want to prominently promote static content on the most prominent space on your site. For example, you wouldn't want a big link that said "Check out our Psychology Glossary!". Visitors would instantly realize you don't have any fresh content and form a low opinion of your site and probably won't come back. The link to the glossary would probably be somewhere on your drop-down menu or at the bottom of a side menu.
| Advantages: |
 | no technology skills required. Static content won't be dependent on having a script to run or be driven by a database or a server-side application. This means you won't have to be proficient with web page coding to put up tons of static content. This is why I say that most beginners' sites will have mostly static content. |
| It is realiable. With static content, you don't have to worry about your database having problems, or content loading times, or a script not working. These pages will be easily displayed without any problems (other than your overall server downtime). |
| You only have to write it once. One of the best things about static content is that you get big returns on your time. If you write static content that is very popular but doesn't change then you can enjoy high traffic for these pages for years without having to invest any additional time. For examples, if you write tutorials then these tutorials can be used for years by many different users. |
| It helps to fill out your page. Putting in static content will make your site more broad. Having more content on your page makes it more likely that a visitor will find something he likes. Also, bigger sites, overall, sometimes look more legitimate because you can tell the webmaster invested a lot of time developing the site. |
| It increases the number of pages that will come up in Google searches. You will be surprised which of your pages pay off the most from an SEO standpoint. Sometimes the less-popular pages will give you more traffic if you rank much higher for those search terms. |
| Disadvantages: |
| For the most part, it is not sticky - Most of your visitors will only need to read it once and then not read it again. For stuff like biographies, interviews, and glossaries, your visitors will not want to bookmark it to come back. |
| Static content tends to very standardized - The content itself will tend to be the same as similar content on other sites. For example, your biography of a particular person will not be that different from another site's biography. |
| When you do have to update static content it will take a while to re-write - This is not that much of a big deal if the jobs are small - refreshing your static content may only have to be done a couple of times a year or so. But if you run a site that has tons of static content that, for some reason, needs to be changed or updated, then it will be a big project. |
| There is less competitive advantage - Since static content tends to be standardized and there isn't any coding involved then it means any webmaster can put up static content. Even if you create unique content then there will be nothing to stop your competitors from copying your idea and there is a good chance that they will. This erodes the long-term advantage of your site. |
Examples
Examples of sites that work well are
about.com (a tutorial and encyclopedia site),
imdb.com (the best movie information site in the internet),
retrosheet.org ( a site that has incredible amounts of historical baseball information),
archive.org (a site that saves old versions of web pages),
whitepages.com (phone numbers),
IRS.gov (they have all their forms online).
An example of a site that doesn't work well is
citytown.info which competes in the area of town information sites with better sites like
epodunk.com. Another example of a site that doesn't work well is
yellowpagesnationwide.com. This page is basically an online yellow pages. But this kind of site already exists so I don't know why anyone would go there - especially when Google Maps will map all the yellow pages entries for you.
Updated Content
Updated content is content that is being refreshed constantly or, at least, periodocally. This gives you the opportunity to offer new content for visitors whenever they come back. For most sites this content will be manually written - like articles. Other times it will be auto-generated content like stock quotes or a news feed that is driven by an application or a script. Because this content will be continuously generated it will be best if you can automate it.
The main role that updated content plays in your site's strategy is to make the content "sticky". This means the goal is to make people want to come back and see what is going to be published next. There are many sites that don't have the resources to constantly create fresh content. This creates a a competitive advantage for sites that do.
More flexibility as far as what content will be shown.
| Advantages: |
| The content is continuously fresh. This gives visitors a good reason to come back often. This reason by itself is good enough to invest time in creating updated content. |
| Differentiation. Publishing updated content, like writing articles, allows you to have content on your site that no other site has. |
| Possible huge returns on your time. If you can automate the content like a news feed or RSS feed then you can build traffic quickly without investing any additional time. |
| Scalable. If you can automate the process you could grow the content without any marginal investment in time or money. |
| There is more of a competitive advantage. Since you have different content than anyone else and are giving your visitors a reason to come back to your site it is easier to build a long-term successful business. |
| Disadvantages: |
| It is more difficult and requires a lot of creativity. If your updated content is comprised of articles then you'll have to constantly be coming up with new ideas on things to write about. |
| Updated content manually will take a lot of time. For example, if you want a page where there will be fresh articles every week then it will be time-consuming to write them. Some webmasters today are looking to outsource article-writing by paying people to write them but there are very few sites that have enough cash flow to be able to do this. |
| It can be technologically complicated. If you are automating your updated content then you will probably be relying on a script to make it work. If you don't know much coding and are having a problem with a script, then your whole site may be down for days or weeks while you find somone to fix it. |
| Possibly slow to load. When information is pulled from a database sometimes the queries will put a strain on the database or the database will not load the content as quickly as a static file will load. |
| It makes SEO more complicated. These days more webmasters are finding ways to get database-driven content indexed in the search engines and search engines are getting more friendly with dynamic content (like query-driven pages). But you still have to make sure your meta tags, title tags, and header tags are being customized the way you want them. |
| Updated content sometimes tends to have a limited life. If your updated content is related to timely events (news items or celebrity rumors) then this content's value will drop over time. A site that publishes updated content is like a pet that always needs to be fed. |
Examples
Examples of sties that work well are
usatoday.com for news articles and
quote.com for time updates. An example of a site that doesn't work well is
realitytvplanet.com. This looks like a small site in a broad category that can't keep up with the better sites like
realitytvmagazine.com and
realitytvworld.com.
Interactive Content
This is content where your visitors can post information to your site by interacting with your site and with other visitors. The most popular examples are: a forum, a comment section on pages, polls, journals, or quizzes.
The four great advantages of interactive content are: 1. After setting it up, it takes little time for the webmaster to maintain. After setting up a forum, polls, or quizzes then you don't need to do much. 2. You are actually getting your visitors to build your content for you. For example, every webmaster starts a forum because they know if their forum becomes popular they can then get a lot of traffic for their a site but don't have to cater to the visitors much. 3. Dynamic content is sticky. Making a page interactive will build traffic more because a person who reads an article and then comments on it will be more likely to come back to that page to see how other people responded to his comments. 4. Interactive content makes your visitors feel like they are part of the site as they talk to other people and get to know people. This builds their loyalty because the community that they are know a part of isn't something they can get from another site.
These days everyone is setting up a forum but unfortunately they are finding out that it is not as easy as it looks. This is because of the "
network effect". This means that you need a huge volume of other people in order to make the service valuable to anyone. Having good interactive content is like running a poker site - if there are no other people there then it doesn't have any value to a few people. And although I do recommend your site has a forum I think many webmaster underutilize other interactive tools they can be used on their site. Commenting on different parts of the site, like articles, is one of the best ways to build traffic. For some people reading articles is boring, but the comments spice things up and the comments end up gaining more attention than the article itself. And polls and quizzes are features that I don't see on sites often enough.
| Advantages: |
| Good interactive content is very sticky. If someone on your site is involved in a conversation with another person they have to come back to your site to continue that conversation. |
| Most of the time you need no coding knowledge. This is because there are free scripts out ther everywhere that help you set up a forum, poll, or a quiz. |
| It takes little time investment. Your visitors are the ones that are building your content. |
| The network effect. The "network effect" can insulate you from small competitors who can't build enough traffic to compete with you. |
| Disadvantages: |
| It is the hardest kind of content to build. This is for a couple of reasons. One is because it is extremely hard to get people to devote their time and effort to posting on your page. A second reason is because everyone is trying to do it today by setting up forums. |
| There are few SEO benefits. Sometimes you may get a forum thread to come up in a Google search but other than that you will get no "free" traffic like you would get with static content. |
| It is harder than it looks. Getting people to post on your page is harder than you think. |
| The network effect. The "network effect" will work against you when you are trying to build traffic. |
Examples
Examples that work well with interactive content are
hotornot.com which allow visitors to rate the pictures of other visitors. There are so many good forums out there that there is no point in showing examples of those.
Which Is Better? A Static Or A Dynamic Site?
Linear Mode
