Essential Web Design, Part 2



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In my first article I covered layout, content and basic design for drawing visitors. In this article, I intend to cover the tools that make a good website a draw for repeat visitors.

One of the tools that is sure to draw people to your site, is a message board. Messageboards give visitors a forum to ask questions, voice opinions and vent. When visitors feel they have a forum with which to interact with you, it makes you more real to them than just cold static web pages. As far as threads go, it is always good to have threads that mirror your websites purpose (i.e. If you have a health website have threads that pertain to health like Excercise Tips, Exercise Equipment, Recipes, etc.,). It is also a good idea to have a humor thread for users to post jokes, tales, personal stories, etc., this develops community. When people make friends online (or anywhere for that matter) they want to visit their friends and hear from their friends. Your site can provide that venue.

Another tool that will help draw people to your site is games. Offering online games allows your users to escape for a few minutes and have a good time and relieve some stress. I use javascript and Shockwave games for my site. There are tons of games and game sites to choose from so you can taylor games to your site. Some will even allow you to host games on your site. This is the best idea by far, that way people remain on your site. Some game sites have affiliate programs, so if a person on your site decides that they like the game enough, they can purchase it and you'll get a commission. Making money from your site is something I will cover in another article.

A newsletter is another great tool for drawing visitors. Create a newsletter for your visitors (I use a autoresponder from GetResponse.com to send out my newsletter). They have to sign up for the newsletter by entering their information and their email address. This way everytime you send out your newsletter, you are reminding them of your site (and hopefully how fun and/or informative it has been to them).

Another tool that will actually help you GET visitors is a tell-a-friend script. Have a tell-a-friend script on your site so that your visitors can gush about you (and your site) to their friends (and they'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, ect.,).

Other tools that have proven good drawing tools (at least for me) are music and videos (provided your host provides you with the bandwidth). Providing music and videos holds your visitors attention and is entertaining. The videos don't have to be music videos, they can be informative videos, dramatic videos or funny videos.

And you know what's cool about all of the above. You can get them all for free as many webhosts have a lot of these tools available with your hosting package. Hosts like Probuildertool.com and VeryVipHosting.com offeronline site building and many of the aforementioned tools. Hosting only sites that offer similar tools include AFMU.com, Startlogic.com, and EasyCGI.com. As always, I hope this helps.



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Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no?

Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?

I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site.

This strategy never makes me a passionate user.

What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content.

So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal.

Welcome Googler, let us help you out

Here we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that manuscript post isn't quite ready yet.)

  1. Check referer string
  2. If search engine, grab query text
  3. Do a full text search on your content to find other articles on your site that are related to their search query
  4. Pass the resulting list to the reader in a user friendly way
  5. Maybe keep that list persistent for the session, unless they close it

What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site.

Placement etc.

We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too).

We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)?

As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing.



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