Creating a Sticky Web Site

When used to describe a web site, the term ?sticky? refers to a site that is able to get viewers to stay at the site longer and come back frequently. Sticky web sites are more likely to turn viewers into customers.

10 Ways to Make Your Web Site ?Sticky?

1. Keep content fresh! Feed daily news or update the site frequently with new information.

2. Use appropriate interactive tools for feedback and user participation such as chat rooms, discussion boards, polls and surveys, or feedback forms.

3. Teach your viewers. Adding tutorials and quick how-to articles to your site is a great way to bring viewers back. Proving you?re an expert in your field will also help turn viewers into customers.

4. Offer an electronic newsletter. Allow viewers to subscribe to your ?e-newsletter? and include advertisements or descriptions of your new products and services in the newsletter.

5. Keep your web site pages light in content. In other words, don't fill the screen with a lot of text and expect your viewers to stick around!

6. Make the navigation intuitive. Use familiar navigation tools such as hyperlinks, buttons, or pull-down menus. Ask others to navigate your site and give you feedback. Better still, make it possible for viewers to provide feedback when they're not able to find what they're looking for.

7. Give something away for free and hold a contest that allows viewers to enter daily! What better prize to give away than your products or services?

8. Brand your web site with your corporate identity. Make sure your logo is on the site and visible to the viewer. Displaying the web site's address on the page along with your organization's contact information will help them find their way back to you.

9. Provide value-add information to your viewers. This could include recommended books, tips, top tens, product manuals, tools for download, or other useful information.

10. Make your site visually appealing and easy to read. Dark text on a light background is more apt to keep your viewers reading. Keep the graphics to a minimum, though! Excessive use of graphics will force your pages to load slower and potentially turn your viewers away.

Sherry Schuller is President of ViralCommerce.com and Zabbo Communications. She is the founder of the Conference on Strategic Growth for Businesses and Entrepreneurs, co-author of 222 Ways to Entrepreneurial Success, and has assisted many organizations with strategic planning, branding, marketing, advertising design, training, and application development. She was previously an Internet Specialist for IBM's leading North American distributor, Business Partner Solutions (now Avnet), and an independent consultant for various firms, including PRIMEDIA, Inc., the leading provider of targeted content and integrated marketing solutions in consumer and business-to-business sectors.

More Web Development Articles

Link Trades That Waste Your Time
Never has competition been so difficult in the Internet world. Google and Yahoo keep indexing more and more pages, into the millions upon millions, and yet more and more people are creating super quickie links pages that are supposed to get other webmasters to want to trade links with them.

How Improving Your Sites Usability Can Increase Your Buyers by 40% and Boost Each Order By 10%!
With all of the factors involved in designing and building a web site, one of the most influential questions is often overlooked:Is your site easy to use?Usability isn't the same as design. Just because you've hired a talented designer to craft your site and make it look great doesn't mean it's easy to use.

Preventing Repeat Form Submission Using PHP Sessions
We've all seen those messages on some websites warning not to click a button more than once or negative consequences, like paying a bill twice, may result. Sometimes we can cause these problems by hitting the back or refresh buttons.

Make Your Own Website - General Website Design Tips
Wow, we`ve already taken a domain and chosen a web host. Great job ! Now it`s time for something special: making your own website.

A Website Is Not Enough
Your ObjectiveYour small business needs an appealing and professional website but that is just the beginning. If no one visits your website and -- more importantly -- if it does not bring in new customers and allows you to sell more to your current customers, then your site is not effective.

Set Up Your Website in Minutes ? For Free
There was a time not long ago when setting up a website meant endless technical jargons, hiring a web designer, writing the html or jawa codes, selecting the right hosting platform and deciding on the band width.Now setting up a website is like 1.

Ebooks for Webmasters
Internet has opened a whole new world for web developers and web designers who are looking to get their websites developed that are finally launched on the huge world of World Wide Web. Keeping that factor webmasters are the people who have to face a lot of problems mainly due to the entrance of new software, programming languages and viruses that are a real threat for the webmasters.

Stop Losing Precious Web Site Traffic to the Dreaded World Wide Web Black Hole
You work hard to build traffic to your web page. If you are not doing 1 simple step you are loosing a portion of all your web site traffic to the dreaded World Wide Web Black Hole.

How Worldly is Your World Wide Web?
The growth in Internet usage around the world is astounding - 146% in the five years prior to March 2005. And it's not just European and North American users on the Net.

7 Tips to Make Your Order Page Work Harder
So your prospect, Mary, is sitting at the computer reading your compelling sales letter. She's convinced she needs your product.