When surfing the Web these days, you often come across web sites that suffer from stagnation – they look old, obsolete or appear to have been designed by an amateur. Your web site needs continuous improvement to capture and engage your visitor’s attention. If not, they can easily click away to your competitor’s site.
5 steps to prevent web site stagnation
1. Define a clear purpose – when visitors arrive at your site, they should immediately know what your site is all about. You should introduce this in your first paragraph. A graphic may help to supplement your explanation.
2. Create a clear theme throughout your site – as time goes by, you may add things to your web site that has nothing to do with your original theme. You hope it will attract more visitors. This may be in the form of banners or links from other popular sites. Don’t do it! Why?
This only seeks to distract people from the focus of your site. Instead, reevaluate your site’s content and overall design.
3. Provide valuable content – “content is king” on the Net. People are looking for easily accessible information about your product or service. Your homepage should entice visitors to dig deeper into your web site. Sometimes you are too close to your web site, that you can’t see what changes are needed to improve it.
Get other people to visit your web site and ask them for their honest feedback. Based on this, make the appropriate changes.
4. Harmonize text and graphics – recent sites I’ve visited, had hard to read text (they used the same font as they would for printed media). Sometimes sites have all their text capitalized. Others have a graphic that takes up most of the page, making the web page slow loading or the text rolls onto the graphic.
Create your web pages where the background colors of your web page are lighter than the text (black text on a white background is still the easiest to read). Create graphics that enhance the appearance of the page and support the content.
5. Create site interactivity – a static web site won’t allow visitors to interact with your web site. Because the Web, is an interactive medium, create ways in which your visitors will either want to return or be invited to return. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Write an informative newsletter – create a subscription box on your web site with a link to a sample of your newsletter. In your newsletter you can invite them to new products and services on your site.
Run a contest – include a contest form on your web page and invite them to return to see if they are the winner.
Create a poll or survey – you could have a weekly or monthly poll or survey, then publish the results at the end of period.
Create a chat room – invite people for one hour a week to chat with you about your area of expertise. This may become something they look forward to.
Give something away – people love freebies. If you do a search for “freebies” on Google you will get 1,400,000 sites that offer free products or services. Make sure the product fits with your target audience.
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable
Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his
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