5 ways to keep website visitors coming back

Monday, February 15, 2010

A huge topic of discussion on the web is how to get traffic to your website. There is much debate and discussion regarding the methods used to bring in traffic such as using search engines, links back to your site on other sites, and articles. Certainly, getting traffic to your website is important but another important issue that is much less often discussed is how to keep visitors coming back. What good is the traffic you get from search engines, other sites, etc. if no one comes back to your site?

Just as there are many methods to get people to come to your website in the first place, there are many methods for convincing people to come back.

NOTE: If you are running an e-commerce site, remember that returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers. A returning visitor = someone willing to buy.

Methods to keep your site visitors coming back:

  • Start a forum, chat room or shout box
    Without a forum, chat room, or shout box a website is one sided. That is, you provide content, the visitor gets it, and goes. But with a forum, chat room or shout box you are giving the visitor a chance to be a part of things. You are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost daily (or they could even come back every day!)
  • Start a blog
    Keep a blog on your site and keep it updated with fresh content relevant to your website’s topic whether that is computers, cars, bicycles, your company news, or even yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh content frequently.
  • Carry out polls or surveys
    Polls and surveys are forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls and surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
  • Have puzzles, quizzes and games
    Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting form of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

NOTE: We are not encouraging you to slack off at work, but there is no doubt that many people do and will continue to :)

  • Update frequently with fresh content
    Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something new to read. This is the most widely known and most effective method of getting visitors to come back to your site, but it is perhaps the least carried out one because of the laziness of some webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site fresh!

    A good way to display the most recent updates to your website is by using an RSS feed. Learn all about RSS in our RSS tutorials section. Also visit our RSS page for information on how you can get the most recent updates at landofcode.com
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5 important rules in website design

Thursday, January 28, 2010

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1. Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first thing you see when you arrive at a website. You’ve seen them before – those pages that have no real content on them except a heading like “Welcome” with some graphics or a link that says “Click here to enter”. Don’t make your visitors have to take an extra step to enter your site. Instead, give them the value of your site right away.

Website visitors generally don’t like splash pages. It is best to go without one.

2. Do not use excessive advertisements

One thing that turns visitors away from a website is too much ads. There are sites on the web that seem to be cluttered with ads all over the place. You get to the site and there is an ad at the top, you scroll down a little and there are ads in the content and the left and right sides as well and you keep scrolling and even more ads!

If you’re going to be including ads on a website then you should have a good balance between ads and content. You want your first time visitors to like your site and have a desire to come back (your regular visitors as well) so the website content should be prominent, but at the same time you also want to make some money from the ads, so they should be noticeable and well placed. The content of your website should be more prominent than the ads, but the ads should be visible enough for your visitors to take notice.

Another important rule to remember with ads is that your visitors should feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3. Have a simple and clear navigation

A clear navigation is one of the most important things a website needs to have. Without it, your visitors will be lost and may not want to come back to your website again.

A navigation system should be emphasized on a page so that the user notices it right away. A good idea would be to use different background colors for a navigation system (like the menu bar at the top of many pages on the internet) to make it stand out. Another important point when it comes to navigation is that your links should be clearly labeled regarding where they will take the visitors. For example, if you have a page on your website about the history of computers some good text for a link to this page would be “History of computers” as opposed to a very broad label like “Computers” or even “About computers”

One of the best things you can do for the navigation system of your website is to use a sitemap. A sitemap is a special page on your site that lists your entire site’s structure so that your users will be able to see how your site is organized and easily navigate through it. Read about sitemaps in detail at our The importance of a sitemap blog entry. Also check out our own sitemap.

4. Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deep within your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

This is especially true for sites that contain many directory levels (3 or more). A good way to easily let the user know where they are at the moment is to use a ‘trail’ at the top of the page indicating the exact location by page and section. You can see this concept in action at our web development forums. Notice the trail in the yellow bar at the top of the page, it tells you what forum as well as subforum you are in and also includes a link back to the board index.

5. Don’t let audio files start playing automatically

Besides being a habit of myspace.com users and a bad usability practice (someone might have their speakers on full volume and suddenly the sound from the video starts blasting out of nowhere), it is very annoying. Because to shut it off, the user has to scour your page to find the control to do so. They can just go ahead and shut off their own volume, but what if they need it or were using it for something else at the moment? This is a bad usability practice and should definitely be avoided.

Another rule regarding audio files on webpages is don’t hide the control for the audio file object. The volume that you set initially may not be to someones liking, someone might want to stop the audio or start over half way through the audio, there are many possibilities. Having that control for the user is an important thing.

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The importance of a sitemap

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

A lot of thought goes into building websites, and rightfully so. A website is not just a collection of pages you put up on the internet for someone to see, rather it is an entire system involving many factors including design, usability, and functionality. One important element of a website (that is sometimes unfortunately overlooked) is the sitemap. A sitemap is a special page on your site that lists your entire site’s structure so that your users will be able to see how your site is organized and easily navigate through it.

Here are 5 good reasons to use a sitemap on your site:

Navigation

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors get lost between the pages, they can always refer to the sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with ease. NOTE: You should make sure that a link to your sitemap is available on every page of your site. This way your visitors can access the sitemap from anywhere.

Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will quickly get the main idea of your site. There is no need to get the “bigger picture” of your site by reading through each page. With a sitemap you will be saving your visitors time (they’ll thank you for it by coming back to your site again :) ).

Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating one page which contains a link to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! NOTE: To be sure that search engine robots find your sitemap, a link to the sitemap should be placed on your site’s homepage.

Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to relevance.

‘Page not found’ improved usability

Have you ever clicked on a link only to be taken to a bland screen that says “Page not found”?  How did you feel about this? How do you think your users will feel when they run across this message on your site? Instead of simply issuing a message “Page not found” when a page is not found, why not make the process a lot more user friendly by automatically displaying your sitemap when a page is not found? This way the user can easily find what they were looking for instead of being disappointed about not finding it and potentially leaving your site.

With a sitemap you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone!

Check out our sitemap at www.landofcode.com/sitemap.php

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Quick Tips To Get More Website Traffic

Monday, January 11, 2010

Online, one of the most significant keys to success is getting website traffic.  The more visitors you have, the more exposure your site gets and the popularity of it will grow overtime (and if you’re running an online business, this of course means an increase in sales and profits!).

Make sure you’re actually tagging your keywords

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag keywords on your pages?  Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your pages.

There are a number of important tag types including:

  • Title tags – Quite possibly the most important place to situate your keywords.  Here’s what they look like – <title>Primary keyword phrase here</title>. Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase. The sentence should briefly describe your site.
  • Header Tags – Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines (after titles).  They’re ranked in order of importance and look like this – <h1>Primary and/or Secondary keywords here</h1> The “1” designates this header as the most important header on the page. An <h2> tag would be the second most important header, an <h3> tag the third most important, and so on.
  • Meta Tags – Provide the descriptive text found underneath the page’s title on the search engine results page.  Like title tags, these should be kept brief, informative and up to date.
  • Alt – Not really a tag, but an attribute (used in the <img /> tag) that provides a text description of images.  Each image on your site should use the alt attribute.

Add content to your site daily

Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking.  Content is what search engine spiders look for and index – without it there’s nothing to index or rank.  Give visitors and search engines a reason to visit and index your site. Make a commitment to constantly provide fresh, optimized content and your traffic will soar.

Procure valuable and relevant incoming links

The more websites which link to your pages, the more valuable search engines perceive you to be, but keep in mind that not all links are created equal.  Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website’s topic.

You can encourage linking to your website by:

  • Adding content to your site
  • Submitting to article directories
  • Publishing press releases
  • Blogging and participating in social networking sites/forums and chat rooms

Be Social!

Now more than ever before, internet marketing (in this context, defined as promoting your blog/website) is about building a community.  Social networking is a very valuable method to generate traffic.  Sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site – create a profile and then post comments and ideas which generate conversation, including of course, links back to your site.

Get involved – Many chat rooms and forums are industry specific. Find those which cater to your industry, and begin participating.  Speak to and connect with a highly targeted audience.

Advertise for more exposure and traffic

Advertising, when done properly is a great way to promote your website. Advertise anywhere and everywhere – on forums, in chat rooms, in articles that you submit to article directories, and more. Whichever advertising method(s) you choose to go with, make sure you DON’T SPAM. This can have negative consequences such as your site receiving a bad reputation or your web hosting company suspending your account. Also, it is unethical.

For best results, create a traffic and SEO strategy. Outline your plan and your goals and then take the necessary actions.

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HTML Page Layout

Friday, January 1, 2010

One of the biggest challenges in creating web pages is deciding what they will look like. You may see a webpage on the web and think to yourself ‘wow, that’s incredible, I wish I could make a webpage that looks like that’ Well, you can! But before your masterpiece comes to fruition, you need an understanding of some fundamental ideas of how webpages are layed out.

Tables vs. CSS

The first issue when thinking about laying out web pages is what mechanism will be used for this purpose?

In the past, the popular practice was to use tables. However, tables have been superceded by CSS. If you are not familiar with using tables, read our HTML tables tutorial.

Using tables for layout

Tables are used to display data in a tabular fashion (like a spreadsheet). Tables organize things in rows and columns, so it was thought that tables can be used to organize an entire webpage and can therefore be used to build out its layout. In the past, everyone was building page layouts using tables, but then people started thinking that maybe this is a bad idea.

It was understood that HTML is used to set the logical organization of a webpage and what elements will appear on it, but not the styles of these elements. Because of this, it was realized that tables are used to display data in a tabular fashion, and should not be used to layout a webpage. To style the elements of a webpage, another language called CSS is used. And yes, the styling of a webpage also includes its layout.

Technically, you can use tables to build page layouts but doing so will result in slower loading, less search engine friendly, less flexible pages that will be confusing to edit (think of all the nested tables), and will sometimes require workarounds to make things look right (those familiar with page layout using tables are probably thinking of spacer gifs right now!). Besides this, using tables for layouts will also make you look less professional as the modern standard for layouts is CSS, and not tables.

Using CSS for layout

So then what is this CSS that can be used for layouts? What is so great about it?

CSS is a styling language that is used to set the appearance of elements on a webpage (things such as text color, page background color, borders around elements) as well as a page’s layout (how many columns, width of elements, margin and padding of elements).

Using CSS for layout, you can edit a separate file that contains the commands for the layout rules of a webpage. By doing so, you can set a set of layout rules for all of the webpages on a website (whether you have just 2 pages or 500), and then you can change those layout rules in just one place and the display of all your pages will change.

What is great about using CSS for layouts is its flexibility. With CSS, you can do things like change the location of page elements in source code and still have a page display the same way. This might sound trivial, but it is important if you want search engines to read certain content first (search engines don’t read webpages like humans do, they read the source code). You can also do things like instantly change the position of certain elements relative to each other by using a CSS mechanism called “floating”.

Learn about CSS in our CSS tutorials section.

The choice is yours

Tables or CSS, the choice is yours, but the advantages are clearly on the side of CSS.

Two column layout

Almost everywhere you go on the web, you will see page layouts in columns. For example, you will see a layout where the navigation is on the left side and next to it is the content. This is a two column layout. You should use a two column layout if there are not many items in your navigation menu. If you can fit it all on one side without confusing the user and without making things look cramped, then a two column layout is the way to go.

Navigation on the left side or the right side?

If you decide to go with a two column layout, the next question you should ask yourself is if you want to have the navigation on the left side or the right side. Generally, the best way to go is to have the navigation on the left side. This is how the majority of websites have it, so this is what most people are used to.

Three column layout

If there are so many items in your navigation or if you feel that three columns provide for better organization, go for three columns.

Navigation on the left side or the right side?

If you decide to go with a three column layout, the next question you should ask yourself is what goes where? You should always keep your content in the center. It should be navigation – content – navigation. The question is which navigation on which side. You should put the more important navigational items on the side that the majority of your visitors will look at first and the less important navigational items on the other side.

Template vs. brand new design

Once you have some idea of what you will use to layout your pages (tables or CSS) and how they will be layed out, the next thing to think about is if you’re going to use a ready made template or a brand new design.

Templates

There are many free ready to use designs on the web that you can download and use on your own site. If you do not want to build out a brand new design and you find a template that fits your page layout vision, then you can just use that.

There are many free template sites on the web. The websites www.oswd.org and www.styleshout.com have some good free templates.

Brand new design

Why go with a ready made template when you can have your own design? Why use someone elses work when you can build something from your own imagination and be proud of your efforts once it materializes! As said in the beginning of this lesson, one of the biggest challenges in creating webpages is deciding what they will look like. Use your page layout vision as a starting point, and try to think creatively. Good ideas will come if you try, they really will.

If you want to get inspired for some creative ideas, check out www.csszengarden.com, www.screenalicious.com, www.stylevault.com, or www.cssmania.com

Layout scheme

One important thing to keep in mind is that not any website can have any layout scheme. The layout scheme should be according to type of site/industry. For example, if you are building a website for a small business that processes credit card orders, you don’t want it to be flashy like www.mtv.com. However, if you are building a website for a small business whose industry is entertainment, then it should indeed be flashy.

Browser compatibility

Once you have your design and you’re ready to build some pages, you should test it in different browsers. Not all browsers automatically render the same way, and sometimes things don’t look right requiring some editing. The browsers you should test on include Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and Safari. These are currently the most popular web browsers. As times change, so can the lineup. You should also keep up to date as to how the browser market is changing to know which browser is the most important one to test for.

Why don’t browsers render the same way?

Ideally, all browsers would render exactly the same way and web developers would never have to test anything knowing their pages look the same everywhere. This is however, far from reality. There are several reasons for this including the fact that different browsers use different layout engines. For example, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, while Internet Explorer uses the Trident layout engine. Another reason for this is that no browser fully follows the standards set forth by the W3C.

Browser testing can be a tedious and time consuming task, but it is something that must always be done.

Screen resolution

Another issue besides browser compatibility that might come up is screen resolution. Web pages may look different on different screen resolutions. Currently, the most popular screen resolution is 1024 x 768. Before that it was 800 x 600, but few people use that resolution size anymore. You should test a design for several screen resolution sizes including 800 x 600, 1024 x 768 (currently the most popular), 1152 x 864, 1280 x 768, and 1280 x 1024.

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t have 6 or so computers to perform all this testing so you can use something like the website browsershots.org. This website lets you see (in the form of screenshots) how a design will look like on several different operating systems, web browsers, and screen resolutions. The only downside to it is the sometimes long waiting time if you ask for a big workload.

Fluid vs. fixed

Do you want the content area of your design to be of a fixed size or do you want it to stretch across the whole page? Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Fluid layout

A fluid layout is a layout that stretches across 100% of the screen width no matter the screen size. With a fluid layout, your content will always fill up 100% of the users screen.

Advantages

  • More content seen at a time

    Since the content fills up 100% of the screen, more of it will be seen at a time. This results in less scrolling for the user.
  • Maximum use of space

    The fluid layout uses the maximum space available. This means that you will not have empty areas on the screen that contain just a background and no content like you would with a fixed layout.

Disadvantages

  • Things may not look right on a screen thats to big

    If a user is using a really big screen, then things may look to stretched out.
  • No 100% control over layout

    If the layout gets stretched for bigger screens, sometimes elements may not appear as you intend them to, relative to other elements. For example, an image may not be aligned correctly with a paragraph.

NOTE: Landofcode.com uses a fluid layout

Fixed layout

A fixed layout is a layout where the content area stays the same size no matter the screen size. With a fixed layout, your content will always fill up a fixed area of the users screen no matter their screen size.

Advantages

  • Alignment is up to you

    With a fixed size layout you can align the content area of a design to the left, center, or right of the page. The remaining space will be a background that you can choose to be a certain color or contain a background image.
  • Elements appear as intended

    With a fixed layout, elements will always appear as intended unlike with a fluid layout where elements may get misplaced due to stretching of the content area.

Disadvantages

  • Content area may look dwarfed on a really big resolution

    When viewed on a really big resolution, a fixed layout may look dwarfed. That is, too small. This may give the impression that the webpage is floating on the screen.
  • More scrolling

    Since the design will be of a fixed size, there is only so much room for the content of the page. This will result in more scrolling for the user (especially users with big screen sizes).
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