Keep your visitors happy

Already built a website or a community, but wondering why its traffic is either not increasing or worse, decreasing? Then you may want to consider a few things and most are related to the website’s maintenance. Maintaining a larger website is rather difficult and time-consuming and it should definitely not be a single person’s job.

Redesign

There are to main impacts you want to have on your visitors, design and content. I’ll have to be a bit specific here when it comes to content since there is a bit of confusion out there where people understand text as content. When I or mostly everyone mentions ‘content’, we’re actually referring to text/media/files resources and everything else that a website displays available.

If you have good content, do you have it under an old and hardly retouched design?

Visitors enjoy seeing the place they revisit well taken care of, otherwise they feel they are in a forgotten place.

Go ahead and start simple, try with a small redesign by just changing some colors here and there, like a different theme. See how your visitors react, you should then know how further you should go. Post a poll about it, have your visitors involved in your website’s look & feel. It would satisfy your visitors, knowing they are enjoying a design they have partially participated at.

Content

Always keep it fresh, no matter how good your content is, new content can only do wonders. Put up a News and Announcements section, let your visitors know of all your updates, consider adding the possibility to post comments on each announcement.

Interact with your users

There are numerous ways you can interact with your users.

Adding polls on various content-related topics helps improve your users’ interest.

One of the best ways to use polls is for website updates and changes, asking your users to choose what they’d enjoy most, what would make them feel mostly involved in your website’s appearance content and functionality.

Surveys aren’t as popular and effective as polls but they’re still a good way to gather more information from your users, to evaluate how you can improve and what would keep your visitors happy. Surveys are usually sent by e-mail, in case you put up a subscription form or maybe you already have a Registration System your users signed up to. You can also make a page with one or more surveys which you can redirect users to. What’s most important is for your users to feel free to choose whether they want to take surveys or not. Forcing them to do so may just show you’re requiring an obligation from them and this can only end to a big loss of traffic.

Always make it simple to get contacted by your users, post clear ways on how they can send you messages.

Communication

Providing more communication tools makes your website one step closer to a natural traffic growth. If you believe you have enough users that have either opinions or ideas to share, then have you considered opening up a forum?

There are quite some nice open-source forum systems out there and I strongly suggest you look out for one. So far, I’ve been fairly impressed by PHPBB which you can find it at www.phpbb.com. It is open source, very easy to install with an installer interface and quite easy to manage.

With a forum, you’ll realize your own website takes life naturally where users partially maintain it with new content, triggering more users and more interest.

There are many more communication tools, but most vary upon your web activity, and some examples would be: online chat, live help chat, internal messages

Entertainment

On most web activities, entertainment is always enjoyed. Consider adding some games or any fun things for your users to spend time on, have them familiarize with your little place.

10 last tips

– be short, don’t let your users read too much for little information

– have the most interesting stuff visible

– be thankful for all the support, make sure your users know

– make your site easy to navigate through

– consider rewarding your users somehow, if it’s the case or possible

– subtle serious advertising has never harmed anyone

– if you’re advertising on other websites, do it with custom designed banners

– don’t work your users too much, to get what they need

– check your links and pages for possible broken ones

– create a custom page for 404 error pages where they can easily return

Conclusion

By now you should’ve realized that your website’s users are number one priority, you are second

Don’t jump applying all the methods to maintain your users, take them one by one and see how they work out for you. Best of luck!

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