Web Design Tips and Tricks

How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites

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Make it Easy

The option to add a website to the favorites menu is quite hidden, and people don't often think about it. You'll get far more people adding you to their favorites if you offer them a quick and easy 'Add this Site to my Favorites' link somewhere towards the top of the page. Even if they don't actually use the link, it still draws attention to the browser's favorites function and makes the user think about it, increasing the likelihood of them adding the site to their favorites sooner or later.

Pay Attention to the Title

Once your site is in people's favorites, of course, it's not going to do you much good if they can't find it again later. You need to make sure that the name and purpose of your site is clearly stated in its title, as that's all they'll have to go on when they're looking through their favorites. Make it long enough to be specific, but not so long that it looks self-important or information gets lost off the end.

Tracking Who's Done It.

It can be difficult to know who's coming in to your site using a favorite they saved. Usually, you would look at the referrer to see where they came from but if they type the web address or use a favorite the referrer will be blank. There's no way of telling which of those two things they did unless you send people who use your bookmark link to a special address for example www.example.com/bookmark. However, this method is not foolproof because not everyone who adds your site to their favorites will use your link to do it.

Promise Updates

If you want people to add your site to their favorites then you need to give them a reason to come back. The best way to do this is to make it clear exactly how often your website is updated. You might write at the top of your website 'updated weekly' or you might simply write the date when you last updated the website. The second way only works if you update your website often.

Could You Be Their Homepage?

Of course, if you want to go even further than just getting people to add your website to their favorites then you should consider trying to get people to make your website their homepage. That is, the website that loads automatically when they first open their web browser and that they get back to when they click on their home button. If you can get your website as someone's homepage even for a relatively short length of time then they are likely to see your website dozens of times in a day.

So how can you get people to set your website as their homepage? It's a little more difficult than just getting them to add your site to their favorites as it works differently in different web browsers. In Internet Explorer you can give people a link that makes your website their homepage automatically. For other web browsers, however, you will need to give the visitor a set of instructions. This will require some research on your part but will generally be instructions on how to open the web browsers options or preferences menu and use the section that allows the homepage to be set manually.

Before people will make you their homepage, though, you need to offer them the kinds of things that they might want on a homepage. You can't just expect your own content to be enough, you need to give them other things too, such as local weather or a box that they can type searches into to search the whole web using a popular search engine.


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I came across the article from Nicholas Carr's post Should the Net forget?

This is an interesting consequence that seems to be getting pushed on SEO, rather then perhaps looking at it from the aspect of accountable reporting, no?

Nicholas states that:

With search engine optimization - or SEO, as it's commonly known - news organizations and other companies are actively manipulating the Web's memory. They're programming the Web to "remember" stuff that might otherwise have become obscure by becoming harder to find.

The result is that:

People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.

In Summary

So, in the past as the print info (newspaper issues) simply disappeared or, more recently, as they hid the content behind paywalls and poor SEO, newspapers didn't have to worry about the consequences of articles that contain errors or were never followed up, but now people may suffer from these mistakes and lack of integrity.

What do you think the answer should be? Nicholas Carr asks Should the Net forget? I'm not so sure, and I don't think that the answer is that simple.

There's a learning curve to moving print onto the web, and this case encompasses one facet of what needs to be conisdered, but it would be great if some form of integrity from those doing the reporting kept these kinds of things from happening.

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