There are many reasons why you might want to customize the content of your channel pages—that is, have the same URL display a page that is different in its details when it is downloaded by different individuals or to different devices.

In customizing content for individuals, you typically let the user make some selections which you store as preferences in a cookie. For example, if you have weather reports available for a number of cities, your users would choose a city and then all the weather reports downloaded as part of your channel would be for that city.

Customizing Web pages for user preferences is common on the Internet today. If you have done much desktop Web development, you are probably familiar with using cookies to do this.

Customizing Web pages for different devices is important if you want your channel to look as good as it can on the different devices on which it may be viewed. The differences in the way that different mobile devices display text and graphics are major, far greater than what you may be used to dealing with getting your pages to look good on both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, running under both Windows and Mac OS.

Customizing content involves a fair amount of additional work, but you may only need to do it for a few key pages, like your home page, or for the graphic heading at the top of each page.