What is RSS?

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication - a quick and easy way to create and use 'syndicated content' such as news headlines and announcements. Some websites use RSS to deliver articles and article previews to readers who are too busy to browse multiple sites and dig up the content they are interested in. Other sites use RSS to alert customers of new products or upcoming events.

You can use an RSS 'newsreader' or 'aggregator' on your desktop computer but we're talking about web sites here (cause that's what we do at Spiral!).

What do I do with it?

There are 2 ways you could use RSS

1. incorporate RSS feeds on your site to provide information, which is relevant to your product or service, that your customers will want to read.
   
   Maybe you sell an environmentally friendly product? You have determined that your customers are interested, not just in your product, but in the whole area of the environment. So you take an RSS feed from two reputable environmental sites. Soon your customers are coming to your site for their news - your credibility is enhanced .
   
   
2. provide an RSS feed to other web sites.
   
   An example might be - you sell art work on your web site and you specialise in NZ contemporary sculpture. Every month you write an article on this topic and provide and RSS feed. Art sites around the world pick up on the feed and use it to pad out the information they provide. Soon you have visitors from all around the world coming to your site, because they have read your article in where-ever. Your credibility is displayed and you get more visitors to your site .

So what use is RSS to my customers?

Some of your customers may want to:

• get all their related news on one site (yours)
• read your blog - if you have one
• etc etc - we can think of zillions of uses

If you hear the term Atom feed - it's pretty much the same as RSS. We use Atom to take our feed from blogger.com and display it on our home page

© Spiral Web Design Limited

March 2005

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