In this article we will be talking about ideas to use in order to keep visitors returning to your site.

What is the one problem that every website faces in terms of traffic? I would say the issue that every single website on the internet faces is the issue of visitor loyalty.

What is visitor loyalty?
Visitor loyalty is basically creating a reason for the users who visit your site to come back to your site on a recurring basis.

How do we create a reason for users to stay on our site?

Compelling Content. So, what constitutes compelling content?

The best type of content you can write about can fall into a few categories:

1. write about what you know best
2. keep a journal of your endeavours towards trying to learn a popular skillset
3. write about the media, this call fall into many different categories, such as politics or entertainment, if entertainment then you can focus on films — upcoming films, past films, ideas for a great film that should be made, I hope you get the point by now.

It all depends on the type of site you have really. but you should have a goal in mind for what kind of content your site provides to your visitors.

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We are proud to introduce our new system for all freelance designers out there. We have the simplest and the best system out there. The interesting part is that you are all familiar to it: $1 gets you $1. To purchase leads on our site, all you need to do is deposit money into your account.

Why is our system better?

Well first of all, it’s just plain easy. $1 gets you $1. Not $3 or $4 gets you one point/credit like other sites. It’s just converting from money to points/credits is just confusing. Don’t you just hate it where you have to buy more 5 more credit and you only need one? With our system, you are not limited to what increments you can buy. You can put the exact amount. If you need $17 for the lead, you can deposit $17.

Credit system causes extensive spending.

I don’t know about you. But the small numbers in a credit system makes me want to spend more money. If I spent $20 to purchase 5 points/credits, physiologically, you are thinking that 5 credits is not a lot. So you go ahead and spent the points/credits and the next thing you know, you have to buy more. Obviously, they are greedy. Let me show you an example on how our system is better and simpler:

We have two projects: A and B
Using Point/Credit System
Project A costs 7 point/credits
Project B costs 4 point/credits.
Your initial purchase: 10 points/credits.

In this example, you ended up needing one more point. But you can’t buy just one point/credit. You need to buy at least 5. So you end up spending a total of $45 for 15 points/credits of which 4 you don’t need. So you just wasted $12.

Using our system

In our system, you can exactly in put the amount you want to deposit: just like you are at a bank. If project A and B costs you a total of $33, you can deposit the exact amount. No wasting money here.

And the best part: the system is a lot easier. Just look at how many lines I had to use to explain the points/credit system.

1) Annoying Splash Pages or splash pages in general

if you were surfing the web looking for a certain type of product, and you stumble on 2 different sites, site A and site B for example. site A shows you the product while site B shows you a “Now Loading” sign followed by some animation before you can even see the product. Who is more likely to turn potential visitor into a customer?

2) Confusing Navigation Structure
Nothing is more frustrating than having to spend some time trying to figure out how to use a website.
Take the following images for example:

What do you want to do today?
there are no contrasting elements, everything looks the same, except every button of this page links to completely different sections.

What do the graphical icons on the right side do? I have no idea at first glance. This is what I call poor navigation structure. Nothing is discernable, and you have to play guessing games. Stuff like this is destined to failure in terms of user-friendliness.

3) Unreadable text

Unreadable text is the worst. If visitors cannot read your text, then your message is lost completely.

4) Excessive use of flash for content

Websites created exclusively in flash are incredibly cumbersome to update site content, as well as impossible to bookmark. If people cannot bookmark your pages, there’s nothing to pull from the site because of poor foresight. There’s really no way for users to go straight to the content they want to see and no way to send links to their friends, resulting in lost traffic and lost potential backlink. Which is something that will be talked about later when we list a few ways to get users to return to your site.

5) Long load times
Annoying splash pages can be slotted within this same category. If you’re running a personal website like a portfolio or resume of work, you are free to make it take however long you want to make it load because it’s your own personal site and you have nothing to lose, no visitors to convert to customers. On the other hand if you’re trying to sell a product, service and convert those visitors into customers, then it’s the exact opposite, you want to compel them to stay, you need to get grab their attention and communicate your goal to them instantly.

In Conclusion,
If you want those visitor to customer conversions, you need to avoid splash pages like the plague, present the user with the worlds most easy to understand site navigation — keep it simple!, make the text easy to read, avoid using excessive flash, keep the html text to flash animation ratio to at least 2:1 and optimize your site to load fast!

I hope that you enjoyed this article, and stick around for the next one, where we will be talking about how to keep your users coming back.

Directory Submission

You can get your site listing on multiple site directories that exist out on the internet, just type in “directory submission” into your search engine and you will find this. The way this works is you put your category within the directory and get your site listed within the directory. Each link will count as a backlink to your site which is what you will want. Think of this as trading links with webmasters except these links do not carry as much weight as a link from a site that is heavily optimized for their relevant keywords.

Article and Press Release submission

This is utilizing the same idea as obtaining backlinks from web directories, except these article sites carry a litte bit more weight because you will be targeting article submission sites that are within the same topic threshold that you are working in. At the end of your articles you will want to place a link back to the address of the article on your site at the credits section, this is to avoid your articles from being tagged as duplicate content and thus lowering your site’s value within the search rankings.

Trading direct links
How to get webmasters to link to you

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1) Annoying Splash Pages or splash pages in general
They suck, why?
They leave a bad first impression
They take too long to load
They usually tend to be too drawn out and complicated and
They hurt your sales, why?
The average user on the internet tends to get bombarded with information constantly. by the time They’ve come to your site you will probably be the 100th site of the day. you want to minimize the chances of being filtered out by people who come to the site and you ideally will want to maximize The amplification of your product being noticed.

2) Confusing Navigation Structure
These days websites tend to have alot of information and organizing the information can be hard. but when a website seems like it can’t break it’s content into simple easy to use navigation, it becomes a real chore to sift through the site.

3) Unreadable text
Websites who place white text on black backgrounds or any type of text that is hard to read because it contrasts with the background elements.

4) Excessive use of flash for content
A few years back mtv.com’s website was entirely in flash. the web agency that came up with this idea is still around surprisingly. but the old flash site is gone.
website content created entirely within flash, cannot be bookmarked, everytime the user wants to go back to a specific section of the site they will have to navigate from the beginning of the site in order to reach the section they had previously visited.

Flash website content cannot be indexed by search engines.

Flash websites tend to eat alot of computer resources on the client-side.

5) Long load times
No one uses 56k anymore, the majority of people using the internet these days are on some type of broadband connection. so why is it that even with a broadband connection that there are still sites that still take a long time to load. site optimization is key.

And those are the top 5 mistakes that companies usually make with their websites. In the next installment we’ll go more in detail about the confusing navigation systems and unreadable text.

Aside from being the Day after Presidents Day, we have finally launched our newest site: http://blog.freedesignquotes.com today. Our team will be working hard in bringing you articles and tips focused on web site design and development.