How to make sure visitors keep coming back to your website

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A great (sticky) website is like a great relationship. Everything feels right, most of the time. (And you really want to go back there at the end of a long day.) It’s a place you find comfortable, that consistently gives you what you need.

Visiting a bad website is like turning up for a first date, looking through the door of the cafe and deciding you don’t really want to meet that person after all. You might not be able to articulate why, all you know is that you want to bounce, right now.

Breaking it down into some specifics, what are some of the design elements you should be working on to start building that lifelong relationship with your customers?

  1. Resonance: Once a visitor arrives on your site, they should quickly get the feeling that they are in the right place. Your site offers the things they are looking for, in the way they like to see them and talks in language (words and pictures) that makes sense and resonates with them.
  2. The right price: If you have something to sell (and 90% of us do), your visitor will quickly be looking for the indicators that suggest the price is right for them. If a website looks very budget, filled with stock imagery and with little obvious sign you have invested time and money in designing and developing it, they will expect your products or services to be cheap too. If your website is large (with depth of content) and has many complex features, or looks like a team of designers have crafted every pixel, the prospective customer will have an expectation of a higher price point.
  3. A warm welcome: Make your visitors feel at home immediately with welcoming, accessible imagery. That doesn’t mean you can’t do something fresh and different, but stay away from the alienating and difficult – unless that’s what your brand is all about. Your choices of images, colour and other design elements should all be made for a clear reason, and they should also work cohesively as a whole.
  4. Easy navigation: Don’t get too cute with your site navigation. It has become widely accepted that navigation should follow the “usual” form in terms of what you label the top level pages, and the natural logic of the site architecture. Deciding to put the Contact Us page in some obscure location because it’s “different” is not going to do you or your visitors any favours. (FYI the Contact page is usually the second most visited after the homepage of virtually any website.)
  5. Don’t swirl: Sites that zoom in and out or have tricksy graphics that distract from the content and purpose of the site are no fun. I don’t want to experience motion sickness when I’m looking for new shoes, ta very much. The only time you will see me coming back is when I am showing others how awful the site is.
  6. Don’t be afraid to evolve: If you have a site that gets plenty of return traffic, feel free to allow the site design to evolve gradually with the site visitors. Freshen up the home page with new content regularly, make design tweaks periodically and keep testing to see what works better.
  7. Always keep the viewer/reader/customer in the middle: Your business or organisation doesn’t exist in isolation. Without customers you don’t have a business, and without visitors your website has no real reason to exist. Keep the objectives, needs and desires of your visitors at the heart of your decision making process.

 

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