Failing to retain visitors is a costly mistake. The marketing rule of thumb is that
it costs fi ve times as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell to a returning
customer. Obviously, then, once we have a visitor, we want to keep her. We are
trying to minimize churn, which is the number of visitors who are not converted to
customers, or who are converted just one time, never to return. Churn is inversely
proportional to the conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who purchase something
before leaving a site. Providing compelling content and presenting products in
the very best light can increase conversion rates and minimize churn.
Creating Content
Web designers don’t usually have to provide the content for a site. If the site is
data-driven such as Amazon with its product database records from the database
comprise the majority of the content. If the site is informational, subject matter experts (SMEs) most likely provide the content, just as physicians provide the content
for a site like WebMD.com. If the site is primarily for marketing, the organization’s
Internet Internet advertising staff generates most of the copy.
Nevertheless, there may be times when you, the designer, may be called on to suggest
content, write the content yourself, or critique and edit content you have been
given. Keep the following in mind:
- The employed writing style should match the voice of the site, whether formal,
hip, humorous, chatty, or stilted. You wouldn't use a formal, academic writing
style on the Disney site any more than you would use a casual, chatty style on a
site that posts the latest physics research for college professors.
- Carefully inspect all content for correct grammar and spelling. If possible, hire a
professional copyeditor for the task. If that is not possible, employ two copyeditor
tricks:
- Read the content aloud. Reading aloud forces you to look at every word,
something that many of us don’t do when reading silently. Additionally, your
ear can often catch grammatical problems that your eye misses.
- Read the content backwards, which forces you to look at each word for correct
spelling.
- Consider employing a descriptive, one-sentence-or-less tag line that succinctly
summarizes what the site does, something that is particularly enlightening to
our visitor if our organization isn’t well known. The tag lines on the examples
below are italicized:
- Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible web site
- IMDb: Earth’s Biggest Movie Database™
- Dr. Dobbs: Software Tools for the Professional Programmer
- You may not use any content (text, images, or multimedia) from other sources
without written permission from the copyright owner, or you will be risking legal
penalties. Many copyright owners are happy to grant permission as long as
credit is given.
- Aim for a clear, concise, and vigorous writing style. Vigorous writing uses strong,
descriptive, and evocative words. Contrast the following two sentences:
- “She walked down the street.”
- “The young lass trudged through the dingy alley.”
The first sentence is bland, while the second sentence conjures a memorable
image as a result of its colorful and specific language. Vigorous writing engages
the visitor, as long as it doesn’t become too wordy.
Creating a Sticky Web Site
What can we do to create a sticky site, one that keeps visitors browsing for a long
period of time and returning again and again? Of course, the quality of the primary
content has much to do with a site’s stickiness. In general, the content should
emphasize what our site offers that is of value to users and how our services differ
from those of key competitors. For example:
- Don’t just talk about how impressive the company is give the visitors something
they value right now.
- Update the content regularly, making sure visitors know when it will be updated.
- Offer discount coupons or run special promotions, preferably on a regular
schedule so that visitors check back often.
- Run a contest. Be careful, however, because there are legal ramifi cations as to
what you can and cannot do with a contest.
- Provide value-added content, content that goes above and beyond the original
purpose of the site. Examples:
- Williams-Sonoma (www.williamssonoma.com) suggests recipes that use the
cooking utensils and specialty foods sold on the site.
- At www.photo.net, shutterbugs can contribute their own photos to the gallery
and request critiques from other visitors. Encouraging visitors to contribute
to a site is termed building community. Amazon’s (www.amazon.com) visitorsubmitted
book reviews are another example.
- Rand-McNally (www.randmcnally.com) provides not only maps (its primary
content) but also can suggest the names of restaurants and hotels in a specifi
ed location.
- As your high-school composition teacher drummed into your head, be sure to
answer the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how,” as appropriate.
- Be careful with humor; extreme cleverness can be extremely irritating on subsequent
iterations of the joke. Just think of those television ads that we find amusing
only on the fi rst viewing; from then on, we fumble for the remote control
when those commercials pop up on the tube.
- Avoid displaying a visitor counter. Most visitors don’t trust them, and they are
passé to boot.
- Don’t explicitly welcome visitors to your site, as in “Welcome to Bill’s Bicycle
Shop.” Such a welcome is unnecessary and a waste of good browser real estate.
The only exception would be if you expected a large audience from the Orient,
in which case a welcome message is required good manners.
- Consider formatting longer content as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
fi les if you expect visitors to print the content before viewing it.
- If the date of content creation is relevant, explicitly indicate that date. For
instance, a news article should display a date, while a page showing the solution
to a complex mathematical equation need not.
- When newer content replaces older content, you might want to archive (make
available, but not so prominently on the site) the old content if you think someone
would still be interested in it. Archiving has the advantage of avoiding linkrot
(broken links) from other sites that are linking to your (older) content, as long as
you keep the document in the same location on the server.
- When appropriate, include photos and biographies of key fi gures in the organization.
For instance, a medical clinic would be well-advised to include pictures
and biographies of their physicians. After all, a potential patient might well be
interested in seeing a photo of the person he is trusting with his life. In a case
like this, personality wins out over anonymity.
In summary, you should ask yourself why anyone would want to return to the site a
second time, a third time, or, even better, a 97th time. If you can’t come up with a good
answer for that question, you need to brainstorm ways to enhance the content. | 
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