10 ways to make your Web site 'sticky'

Here are 10 ways to make your site "sticky."

1.Comfort your visitors with familiar items and navigation. Think about walking into a department store or supermarket for the first time. Previous experience tells you where to go to find what you need because there are conventions — established and traditional traffic patterns for you to follow. Similarly, there are online standards now to help orient visitors, making them comfortable and ready to learn more.

In a recent study, Nielsen's consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif., found the following page elements on roughly four out of every 10 sites.
• The term "site map" for the site overview
• A different color after links are clicked and expired
• Shopping-cart links in the upper right corner
• Left-hand navigation for peer-level links
• Logos in the upper left corner
• When used, search boxes on the home page

There may be other standards that apply to your business or industry. Check out competitive sites and, if you decide to flout convention, have a good reason.

2. Keep it simple. The faster and easier the navigation, the happier your customer will be. If you're launching an e-commerce site, it might pay off to outsource some of the complex management and tools you'll need, such as with Microsoft's Commerce Manager. And set up a plan to monitor every page periodically so that you catch broken links and make sure every page loads quickly.

3. Offer a guided tour. "Find out who your visitors are and make suggestions about where they might want to go," says Thomas Obrey, co-founder of PixelMEDIA, a Portsmouth, N.H., Internet services company, explaining that it can be done via navigational cues or by a click-by-click page tour or demo. "It's the same concept as a salesperson greeting you at the store, understanding who you are, and guiding you to what you want."

As an example, Obrey points to the ECCO shoes site (www.eccousa.com), which his company recently redesigned. "The site is 100% engineered to lead visitors around." It has a "front end that markets shoes and a back end that sells shoes," Obrey says.

4. Tell your story. "A Web site is like a mini-broadcasting station," says Terry Isner, creative director at Jaffe Associates, a Washington, D.C., marketing consultant. "It starts right on the home page, which should set the stage by telling a compelling story that positions the company against its competitors." Include clear, concise information about whatever differentiates your company in your industry or niche.

Having an "About Us" section enables you to present the human side of your business by profiling your management team and detailing your company's history. Also, a section devoted to company news allows you to announce new clients, new hirings, new products or features — through press releases you post there. These are "conventions" to many users. Don't discount their value.

5. Update your content as regularly as possible. If you want repeat visitors, you need an answer to every returning user's question: "What's new?"

Even if your site is not content-rich, a key to getting repeat visitors is to offer something new when they return — new graphics, new product information, new offers, new article links, new company news, whatever. If you sell products or offer services, updating your online catalogs and product or services pages regularly will let people know you're still active in the business. It also gives you a chance to vary the offerings you tout and test what resonates with your target audience.

Also, if your business caters to a particular community of users — such as outdoors enthusiasts, musicians, movie buffs, or even retail store owners — consider having a communities section on your site, or a blog. (For more on blogging, see this article.)

6. Say yes to archiving pages. When designing or upgrading a site, it takes little additional cost and effort to add an archiving channel for press releases, investor bulletins, media clips, company fact sheets, sales presentations, product announcements or specs, conference briefings, white papers and other content that you originally posted in more prominent places. You never know when a client will remember some data point or presentation you had on the site and return to forward it to your next prospective customer.

7. Test your labels and links. Before signing off on copy or design, put it through a usability test. Watch a live customer click page by page through your site to see if it's intuitive.

You should also test all top-level site labels, suggests Marcia Yudkin, marketing consultant and author of "Web Site Marketing Makeover." "It's essential to learn whether the labels you've come up with make as much sense to your audience as they do to you." Also use phrases or call-to-action sentences instead of one-word labels for your active links. "Granted, longer labels can pose design challenges, but what's the point of an aesthetically perfect home page with options that perplex visitors," Yudkin says.

8. Always fine-tune your site after launching it. The most common mistake, say many experts, is doing everything right in taking the site live — — but then walking away from the considerable consumer information it can yield.

You should be checking into your server logs to monitor visitor and consumer behavior and traffic patterns. What site or search engine does which kind of customers come from? How long do they stay? On which pages? How do they move through the site? What products or information do which customer segments focus on?

Inexpensive, automated software such as Microsoft's FastCounter Pro can quickly analyze Web traffic and provide you with easy-to-understand reports. Once you get these reports, do something with them! Use the information to edit your pages, fix the navigation, change links, change content, and alter your search engine marketing to respond to customer needs. (See this article to learn more.)

9. Establish trust in your users. Many consumers have now been burned by online experiences, so you must quickly establish business bona fides. Web design conventions (see No. 1 above) can help put customers at ease, but you must also establish individual credibility. The options depend on your business. For example, Richard Solomon, a New York State attorney and author, runs SmallClaimsBook.com, which helps people learn about winning in small claims court.

"I post my television and radio interviews, in addition to book reviews. This shows visitors to the site that I have a product [a book] and a service [public speaking] that are recognized by the media," he says.

Other possibilities:
• Prominent bio or expert credentials
• Customer testimonials
• 100% money-back guarantees
• Free or discounted shipping
• Perks or discounts for second-time buyers
• Generous and clear product return policies
• Live chat online sales support; see Microsoft Office Live Meeting for details
• Letting customers track their orders
• Contact information, with a phone number, on every page
• Online customer access to your inventory
• Online client access to your appointment calendar, such as with Microsoft's Appointment Manager

10. Empower your visitors. Design your navigation and online applications so your visitors can find what they want. Yes, the site's overall look and feel is important and, yes, your copy and content must be assured and professional. But the main mission of your site should be to make each visitor feel that he or she is in charge of the experience.

That's the route to attracting customers — and motivating them to return.

Source : http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/marketing/online_marketing/10_ways_to_make_your_web_site_sticky.mspx

Screen Resolution to design Websites

It's impossible to design a website to look the same in every browser, platform and screen resolution, so don't bother trying. Instead, use a fluid, tableless layout for your design, with % widths that expand and contract to fit a visitors browser setting. Design for the 1024x768 setting and ensure it contracts properly, or 'transforms gracefully', to the 800x600 setting. Margins, page widths and indentation are aspects of page design which can aid readability.

Basic Resolution Facts

640x480 is not dead

While 640x480 is not as required as it used to be, 640x480 is still around. Older computers, laptops with smaller screens, and people who need larger fonts do browse the Web. Even if you choose not to design your page to this resolution you should test your site at this resolution.


. 800x600 is not guaranteed

Many Web site design guides recommend designing Web sites for 800x600 resolution. While this resolution is more common on the Web at large, this may not be the case for your customers. If you're planning on redesigning your Web site, take a few weeks to analyze your browser statistics to determine the most common resolutions used by your customers.

. 1024x768 and higher are still less common

This resolution can be fairly hard to read for many people. A 14-inch flat panel monitor might support 1024x768, but the text is virtually unreadable. Also, many computers sold are set up with lower resolutions by default.

Resolution Items to Think About

Not all users maximize

If you determine that your customers browse at 1024x768, you may be building pages that require horizontal scrolling. Why? Because while they are browsing at that resolution, they don't maximize their browser window, so 800x600 might fit their window better.

Don't forget the browser

Browsers subtract as much as 50 pixels on the right and left, and 200 pixels on the top and bottom. So if you create a table that's 800 pixels wide, customers with maximized browsers on 800x600 resolution screens will have to scroll horizontally

What to Do ?

1. Determine who views your site

Review your Web logs, or put up a poll or a script to determine what your readers actually use. Use the real-world browser size script to track your readers.

2. Base your redesign on your customers

When you redesign your site, build it based on the facts of your Web site. Do not base it on statistics of "the Web" or other sites.

3. Test your site in various resolutions
Either change your own screen size or use a testing site.

4. Don't expect your customers to change
They won't. And placing restrictions on them just encourages them to leave.

Source : http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesign/a/aa123002a.htm

Steps to Create a High Quality Website

What you need are goals, content, structure, design, programming and maintenance. What you need is expertise – constantly. This article outlines – without attempting to be comprehensive – the ten most important steps to create a good website.

1. Commitment
2. Planning
3. Information Architecture
4. Design
5. Programming
6. Quality Assurance
7. Public Relations
8. Success Control
9. Maintenance
10. Quality Assurance

1. Commitment

A high-quality website requires a lot of commitment and effort. Good content requires a lot of commitment and effort. Your users and visitors demand commitment and effort.

2. Planning
You have decided that you really want a website and that this website should really be of an acceptable standard. What you need to do now is a plan:

What is the goal of your website ?
What is the target audience of your website ?
What content do you intend to offer ?
Which key data and metrics will you use to determine your success? (Determine your key performance indicators.)

If you are in any doubts or even fail to find an answer to one of the questions, you probably need a break. Or you could try to seek for help regarding your decisions. Your website won’t mind the wait.

3. Information Architecture

After the planning phase has been completed, don’t immediately start designing and implementing: First, you need to create, test, verify, and reconsider the structure and architecture of your offer. To do this, read a good book about information architecture, look at a few heuristics and have at least 15 users do some card-sorting.

4. Design

Consider a few points before you start the design process:

. It doesn’t hurt to have a look at a few principles, whether specific ones by Tufte or Tognazzini or abstract ones like the golden ratio or wabi-sabi.
. It is essential to keep accessibility in mind, even during the design phase. It is easy to address color blindness, photosensitive epilepsy or sufficient contrast during this stage.
. Test your drafts (don’t wait until the final version). Carry out tests, whether with five users, with more than five because that’s not enough, with n users, just as long as it is cheap, or with none because you place your trust in experts. Test and read through basic rules about usability.

5. Programming

After completing the design process, which should have led to a well operating design, you can now start the implementation. (It is, however, possible, that you start this at an earlier stage already.) In addition to environment (server) and dynamics (script languages), you need to consider the following points:

6. Quality Assurance

After having worked out an elaborate, high-quality information offer on the basis of the aforementioned points, you should still absolutely and definitely carry out Quality Assurance (QA). The launch of your offer is part of this phase, ideally after a final QA. It may be possible to launch your website immediately after having carried out the QA, but only if you have focused on quality from the beginning.

7. Public Relations

Market your website without feeling guilty. Your HTML should already be suitable for search engines (semantics and accessibility). Use a moderate link strategy from this point on and perform conventional Public Relations (PR).

8. Success Control

Make sure that the “key performance indicators( KPI ) you determined at the beginning are measured. If your existing statistics don’t determine these numbers, ensure that they do. There are some useful statistics tools: Google Analytics, Mint, WebSideStory. Use these metrics to evaluate the development and the success of your offer.

9. Maintenance

Maintain your website. Update your website. Look after your website. Add new content on a regular basis.

10 Quality Assurance

That’s right, quality assurance is a process. Keep validating, checking, and testing your documents, contents, and design … again and again.

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10 Steps to Create a High-Quality Website