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Published On: Mon, Mar 16th, 2015

How to Keep Readers on Your Website, 4 Key Considerations

It is rapidly reaching a point where if you do not have a website you will have no presence on the planet. Businesses are discovering that they can reach customers around the world, political organizations use their websites to spread their word, and the man in the street is now using the net to publicize his views through blogs and private websites. One thing that all of these organizations and individuals have found, though, is that a website that is not planned properly will become an ignored internet entity, which is why it is important to plan your site before putting it up on the net. Here are the important things to consider to make your site attractive and accessible on the web.

Welcome page

According to a Time magazine article, the average time a reader spends on a site is 15 seconds. From this astonishing piece of information you can see that first impressions are important to visitors to your site; so make sure it is designed so that it doesn’t turn people away. Your welcome screen should let a visitor know exactly what they are going to get from your site; and they should be able to get it without searching countless pages. Use headlines to give basic information, and allow a simple click to lead to a bigger picture. Never ask people to register to enter your site as it wastes people’s time, and web surfers are notoriously impatient. Keep your welcome screen simple and clear, especially if your flashy graphics and animations are going to slow down the site’s load time.

Public domain photo/ Bergsten

Public domain photo/ Bergsten

Navigation

If it takes too long to find something of interest on your site people will move on, and this is a major failing of many sites; they may have great content but it is impossible to find. Structure your site in a way that people can seamlessly move from stage to stage, or story to story. Your home page should be available at a single click, and having a site map available at all times will give a viewer an anchor to work from. Make sure that any links are obvious and that any old links are discarded if they have no purpose. Your reader will not want to spend more time finding things of interest than reading them; so make sure they don’t

Content

Your site should be full of relevant, interesting content, but achieving this is not as simple as you would think. Badly written content that seems inappropriate or ill-informed will have a reader moving on, never to come back; whereas good content could have visitors coming back time after time and referring others to it. Make sure that you update your content regularly, and remove any that has passed its sell-by date or has been superseded by new information. If you have a marketing strategy, then you will probably be using Search Engine Optimization, which will include content as a consideration. However, all websites need content, and it should be of the highest quality if you want your website to be successful.

Hosting

Make sure that your website is available to the public by using a reliable web hosting service. BestWebHosting.co.uk is a great example of the kind of company to use to help you decide which kind of hosting and server is the most appropriate for you. You can have the best website in the world, but if your server is constantly down, or your shared server is affecting your website’s performance, then it will affect how your website is perceived by the world. The way your sited is hosted is vital, so talk to a professional.

There are other things to consider if you want the perfect website, such as fonts, page layout, use of videos, even security, but these 4 are probably the most important ones; and the starting point for anybody who wants to have a presence on the World Wide Web.

Guest Author: Lolita Di

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  1. Virta says:

    Regarding “using a reliable web hosting service” and having “the best website in the world” ..

    Web hosts provide space and bandwidth, but how many of them can help you build a successful online business? If you want more than just web hosting, as in having hosting as a means to make money online, it also requires using an easy-to-follow, all-in-one, proven, ethical ebusiness-building system (not a get rich quick scheme) to get (1) a significant amount of traffic and get (2) targeted traffic (example of such a system: WhyNotThis dot com). You might end up with more than just having webHOSTING – you will have a webBUSINESS.

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