Making sites sticky

Not only do we need to understand how to bring first-time visitors to our pages; we also need to make our site 'sticky' – i.e. bring visitors back again and again. Perhaps a nicer word is 'magnetic' - since 'sticky' seems to suggest entrapment! We want sites to have an enticing aroma (2 Cor 2:15).

We need to make people feel that they 'belong' – and build a sense of community. These characteristics of a site will help:

• Pages should be attractive, readable, uncluttered and easy to navigate through. Readers must feel in control, and have an immediate understanding where they are on the site, where they have been, and where they can go. Links to different pages should be described in sufficient enticing detail (preferably with TITLE=descriptions within each link) so that it is clear what they will find on that page.

• Pages should be quick to download – not everyone has broadband, and will not for many years to come.

• If the site is a gateway to a range of best resources on its subject, people will want to use it as a starting point.

• Offer frequently-updated pages and current news on the site subject.

• An email newsletter can keep people informed about new pages on the site and other issues. (Look at Women Today and see how the email newsletter complements this evangelistic site.

• Remind people to bookmark the site, even giving them a one-click option to do it. I prefer the advice to right-click on the page, as demonstrated at the end of this page, enhanced with a popup. This also gives people the opportunity to create a desktop shortcut – which may be better than a bookmark. Note that it is hard to find a bookmark/favorite again unless the title tag of the page contains words relating to the page subject. Adding your personal favicon graphic to the root directory will make your site stand out in a favorites list on Internet Explorer.

• If a page is a definitive starting-point for information (for instance, a town/area community page, people may wish to set it as their browser start page. You can explain how to do this, and also offer a one-click option for Internet Explorer users.

• Fun things like online games will bring people back again and again. It is very easy to add simple games to a web-pages.

• A two-way email discussion list gives people the opportunity to ask questions and share their own viewpoints.

• Bulletin boards, where people can ask questions and offer their own views, are a good way of building community. However a site usually needs a large number of daily visitors (2000 has been suggested), before sufficient of them will contribute enough to a bulletin board to make it viable and current. (This is even more true of adding a chat room to a site.)

  If you can find a newsfeed which relates to the topic of your site, this will add topical new content on a day-to-day basis.

• Offering freebies – for instance links to downloadable freeware – can be an added bonus.

• Asking opinions – e.g. using an online poll – can make visitors feel valued.

• Choose an easy-to-remember domain name so that people can come back to your site by memory. Also ensure that your domain works with or without the 'www' portion – this is very easy for site hosting companies to set up, yet not all do so.

• Weblogs (or 'blogs' for short) are becoming increasingly popular for all websites. [More on blogs] Their hybrid nature – a cross between an online journal and a news commentary site – coupled with their constant updates and the way they reflect the author's personality and interests, provide constant fresh content and draw visitors back. Many types of outreach sites would benefit from blog-like fresh content on their homepages.

• You can offer a high-quality photograph, cartoon, or graphic for people to download as a desktop wallpaper, thereby reminding them to return to the site.

• Offering online greetings cards on your site, which the recipients must collect via a page on your site, will bring in new visitors. There are companies that offer this sort of partnership – unfortunately the secular ones offer a range of cards which may not all seem appropriate to a Christian site, and the Christian ones are designed purely for Christian readers. There is the potential for someone to set up a card system which can be used by affiliates in this way. The range could include 'neutral' cards with no specific message, plus others with a gentle evangelistic message. The value of the system is that the recipients would have to visit an evangelistic site for the card pickup. If you have the expertise, it is possible to offer your own 'in-house' greetings cards within your own site, as Love Chilliwack do.

• Remember the needs of color-blind and visually-impaired people. Do not use green text on a red background (or vice versa). Do not specify absolute font sizes because visually-impaired people often cannot set their browsers to resize your text to a readable size.

A related aspect of this is to use your site visitors to pass on the site to others in different ways – for instance via a 'tell a friend' form, offering a news release, and encouraging people to link to the page. Larger web outreaches sometimes offer t-shirts, car-stickers, contact cards and other merchandise which promote the site URL. The technical name for this is viral marketing – it has no connection with computer viruses, but takes its name from the property of a real virus to multiply quickly. The Web lends itself uniquely to this 'pass it on' mentality, which we can use for the Gospel.

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