2. But we are in the Web 2.0 era, so apart from buttons to bookmark your site in their browser, you should also add buttons so that people can bookmar your site in their favorite social bookmarking website. These buttons are often called chicklets. You can get some chicklets here for your blog: http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/02/30-social-bookmarks-add-to-footer.html, or you can use this site: http://www.addthis.com/ to get one button covering multiple bookmarking sites.
3. Speaking of buttons, a third type of button that you should have is an RSS feed button. This can be a simple RSS button for people to add to their sites, or a MyYahoo RSS feed button so that people can add your site to their MyYahoo pages. In order to add these types of buttons to your site, your site needs to be able to generate an RSS feed. The simplest to achieve this is to add a blogging component to your site, since most blogging tools such as Wordpress already has RSS feeds built in.
4. This brings us to the next tip - regular updates to your website. Adding regular content to your website has two advantages: it pulls new visitors who might have your RSS feeds published on their sites, and it also pulls search engines. Search engines love new content and they come back more often to your site if your site is updated often. Updates are easy to do if you have a blog attached to your website, but it is also important to add new content to the regular side of your website. The best type of content to make people stick around is useful information for your visitors such as tips, tutorials, guides and comparisons.
5. Make a newsletter available on your website. Even though it is becoming more and more difficult to get people to sign up for newsletters, it is a very important component of a website and should not be ignored - rather spend more attention on this aspect and even 'bribe' people with a free gift of some sort to sign up for your newsletter. If you can manage to get your visitors to sign up for a newsletter you can send out regular updates of new content and invite people to read the content on your website - thereby pulling them back to your site.
6. Add a 'Recommend this site to a Friend' form so that your visitor can email your website to a friend, or friends. Be careful with this one though since spammers love email forms on websites. Ask your website to install a script that has spam protection built in.
7. Make it easy for people to contact you. Have a contact form on each page. Ensure that you have multiple ways for people to contact you, whether by phone, online chat or email forms. Once again, make sure that your form is protected against spammers.
8. An FAQ section on your site that answers your visitors' questions is important to build trust. These questions are also an easy way to add new content to your site! You could assemble these questions from questions that are regularly asked by off-line customers in your bricks and mortar business. This page can help establish trust in you and your product or service. And trust is absolutely essential if you want to get people to buy from you.
9. Make it easy for people to navigate your site. Usability guru Jacob Nielsen recommends that web designers should keep website navigation as standard as possible. All menus and links should also be clearly marked as such. If people are confused with your website layout and cannot navigate easily from the one section to the next, they will leave quickly! For large sites a trail of 'breadcrumbs' at the top of each page showing the current location of each page in the hierarchy of each site, is indispensable.
10. Make your site interactive. We are moving more and more towards websites that offer interactive capabilities to visitors. This is a broad blanket term that covers anything from forums to blogs, from help desks to online chat support. You can also do online surveys and polls, or allow visitors to upload their own content to your site depending on the situation. Allowing your visitors to interact with your website has two advantages: it builds more content for your site, and it empowers your visitor and makes them feel in control of their website visiting experience.
Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you Web Design and Internet Web Hosting . After spending 20 years in the corporate IT world she recently started her own Web Design and Development company specializing in custom built Internet solutions for small businesses. Visit her website for free tutorials and tips on how to use Joomla! and Wordpress for Web Design
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