Summary

This chapter has been all about the personal touch – or personalization, the act of customizing a site to individual users. It's functionality that doesn't apply to all sites, but for any site that has a degree of user interaction it's a worthwhile addition. Simple things like remembering who the user is make the site much more approachable – users don't have to retype their name, and you can customize content depending on who they are.

Cookies are a simple way of doing this, by simply storing some simple details, and fetching them on each page where required. You can also use sessions to keep track of details for a particular user in the site. An example of this is perhaps a shopping basket, although this leaves you open to the basket disappearing of the user closes the browser. To cure this you can use application state to keep a more permanent store of a users details.

All in all these are simple techniques to keep track of users as they navigate around your site. Anything that makes the site easier to use is a good thing, and will ensure that users come back again and again.