Web Design

"How to Make Your Website 'Sticky'?"

"Sticky" Tips that Make Your Visitors Deeply Rooted to Your Website

Imagine you were having hordes of visitors dashing to your website day in day out, and you thought you're going to make more sales than before, but the truth turned out otherwise.

What actually went wrong? Why weren't you getting more sales? You thought more traffic means more sales?

Now, website traffic is no doubt important to any online business, but how your website looks to your visitors (or audience) is as equally important because this "look" will determine how long they stay put, and if you can make them stay longer, your chances of closing sales will be greater.

Make sense?

So, how should your website look like? Here's a picture I compiled based on my experience that sums up the few main contributing factors (see below).

Let me explain each "sticky" factor under each main point so that you can easily see their importance and in turn apply to your own website design.

Layout

Navigation

Ever been to a website such that after navigating away from the Home page, you can't find any link that could bring you back to the Home page or move to other pages at ease?

Don't fall into your web visitors' bad books just because you can't give them the ease to navigate your site, it's very devastating to your professionalism and in turn, sales.

Organize your links properly and should at least have the main menu on every page for your visitors to navigate back and forth.

Be consistent in positioning your key links.

For example, if on your Home page you had the main menu along the top, then you should also have them along the top on other pages of the same site.

Don't try to play cool by having the menu in different position on different pages. That's going to confuse and frustrate your web visitors!

Bottom line is... allow your visitors to move quickly, freely, comfortably and directly to the products/services or information they're looking for.
Colors

Speaking of colors, some people said you should not use red or yellow because they hurt your eyes.

Well, I beg to differ because to me there's really no right or wrong in using which particular colors for your web page design/layout though red or yellow are usually used in attention grabbers.

Note!
In this context, I'm referring to the colors that are used to design the layout, not the colors of text and background yet (I'll talk about that later in the Content section.

What I think is it really depends on your theme (if you do have one), and then find appropriate colors that is able to express your theme to your website visitors.

For example, take a look at this DJK website. Since it's called Day Job Killer, then of course the design has some bloodstains or so to signify the "killing" and the suitable background colors that blend into the entire arrangement.

This is just to give you an idea.

As for this iOneMoney.com site, I use blue because to me it symbolizes authenticity.

There are too many rip-offs happening online and I just want to do my part to present as accurate and transparent the information to all of you as I could so that anyone who visits iOneMoney.com will feel at ease knowing that they'll not get ripped off over here.

So that's my theme.

But do remember, unless you're targeting kids who love colorful stuffs, try not to use too many colors to doll your website up, that way could make your site score low in terms of professionalism.

Also, don't use green and brown for the Home page, then use totally different colors like blue and orange for other web pages, your visitors might think they have suddenly gotten on other websites.

Be consistent in using colors.

If you want to give a good impression to your visitors who come to your website, stick to just one or two colors (usually white color is not counted towards our color palette in the design).

If you're afraid that your layout might look dull and boring with just one or two colors, you can in fact expand the palette further into say, light green, dark green, light brown, dark brown etc as lighter and darker colors are classified under the same category of that primary color.

Feel free to reference iOneMoney.com's site layout if you want (you can bookmark this website for you to refer back more easily), but need not necessarily use the colors I use, other colors work fine as well, so long as you stick to just a few colors as just mentioned. Keep in mind.

Content

Purpose

What is Your Website for?

The key to success is to start with a purpose. Ask yourself this, "What is it that I want to do with my website? Raise funds for charity or sell products or do something else?"

If it's to sell products, then what is it that you want to sell?

Once you know what you want to do, it'll be easier for you to design your website to meet that purpose.

Make sure you get your ideas across to your audience when they get on your Home page. Don't play subtle. When it comes to delivering your objectives, be clear and specific.
Quality

Some webmasters have painstakingly crafted out several well-written info and great tips, but they are still unable to stop readers dead in their track. They couldn't figure out why their "quality" content failed to keep their visitors (or audience) busy on their site.

When such thing happens, it usually is due to 2 problems, either they got the wrong audience showed up at their websites or their content are not "truly" quality at all.

Side Note!
If you're keen on learning the several sure-fire ways to get the right audience on your website, go to Website Traffic now.

Here I'll show you how quality is then considered quality so that you can increase your site's stickiness and make your audience stay longer to find out more about what you have in store for them.

Now, the quality of content does not depend on how much hours you've spent on writing them or how well written they are.

You can write lots of information or tips, you can write it professionally, you can impress people with your powerful language, but if you're not focusing on the audience and kind of drifting away from your topic, then the quality of your content is not there.

In other words, the quality depends largely on what your audience want and need at the time they're reading your content and how relevant it is to them based on your current topic.

For example, if now my topic here is about how to improve the quality of website content to make your visitors stay on your site longer, instead of focusing on that, I'm showing you the tips to optimize your content so that you can increase website traffic.

Is that what you want? Would you stay put because of that tips that are not relevant to what you're looking for at present even though it's something that all webmasters would want to know?

I can't tell you how many times I've seen something like this and even though the tips may be great, I simply don't feel comfortable staying any longer as I'm afraid I might get confused as to what I'm looking for.

It also shows that the website owners don't know what they're talking about. Do you want to learn from such people?

So, if you want your visitors (or audience) to stay longer, show them what they want to see and need to know based on the topic they had chosen at that time, and focus on how well your information can benefit them.

You can actually ask yourself these few questions while writing out the content for your website so as to keep yourself within the quality track.
- "Is this what most people would want to know about with respect to this topic? (Is there a starving crowd out there for this topic?)"
- "How can this piece of info benefit my readers?"
- Is my content concise and crisp enough? Did I include too much redundancy and irrelevancy?
- "If I'm the reader of this topic, is this what I want to know?"

So these are the guidelines you should always apply and if done correctly, you should be able to come up with a masterpiece that grabs your readers' eyeballs.

In addition, it's best to learn about some extra tips on good design so as to make your website more pleasant-looking to your visitors.