Thank You, Please Come Again

As people begin to trickle into your site, you may begin to grow a dedicated and loyal fan base. On the other hand, visitors might quickly leave and never come back. Getting return visitors is a key component of successful website, particularly a web business.

Keep things simple; sites that are too confusing for your visitors to use will of course not hold onto to a fan base. While you do want people to spend hours looking at content, you don't want them to spend hours looking for content. Figure out the simplest navigation system possible. Remember also, a page without a link to it is a page that no one will ever visit; on the flip side, if someone visits your page without any links to another page of yours, that is the only page they are going to see.

Never change the file names on your site. Visitors will bookmark pages or send links to friends. Even if the content of a page changes, make sure the page name does not. If you absolutely feel that changing the location of a particular file is important, be sure to have something informing your visitors of the change.

Update regularly, even if you cannot update often. Far too often sites site in cyberspace untouched for years. In some cases the webmaster has abandoned ship. But far too often lazy web publishers simply don’t want to create more content. But more important than frequent updates are regular ones. Having a fury of new content for a week and then two months of dormancy is much less user friendly than updating once a week for three months. If a user expects fresh content and finds none, the likelihood of a return visit diminishes. If however, the visitor knows that every Sunday your site gets new content, then Monday morning sitting in his cubicle, that visitor will return.

Fresh content is an important aspect of any site. The latest craze is the Weblog—known also as a Blog. Blogs range in topics from travel to cooking to general laziness. But the interesting aspect of a Blog is the ability to constantly and easily offer updates. Pre-packaged software allows users to remotely log in and add continuous updates to their site. One good set of software for a Bloggin is Blogger.com.

A Blog should by no means be a substitute for a quality, content driven website. However, a Blogs as supplements to the core part of a website is a great way to generate fresh content. Please Blog responsibly.

New visitors are always exciting; but it is the return visitor that makes a website successful and in some cases, profitable. Work to keep people coming back before reaching out to new visitors.