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QuickTips: How to Increase Your Website’s Usefulness

For both your viewers and yourself!

by Matt J. Whetham, August 2009

How can your website become more effective to your organization?  This should be a question that poses everyone who has the responsibility of maintaining a website.  In order to achieve your marketing goals with your website, it needs to be something that:

1. Captures your viewers’ attention
2. Keeps them coming back
3. Encourages them to share your site with others

Here are a few ways you can make some simple additions to your site that will improve its effectiveness drastically:

Add multimedia
People who are surfing the internet are not looking for static, boring text.  They want something that graphically or audibly represents the information that they are looking for.  You have to capture their attention and keep it.  Multimedia is the best way to do this.  A few examples of items which you could add to your website are:

1. Movie clips
2. Flash banners
3. Photo slideshows
4. Audio tracks (i.e. voiceover)
5. Graphs / Charts
6. Photos that represent text

Teach something
Keep them coming back to your website by teaching something – setup a blog on your site, or post articles.  This works as a double-edged sword, as it not only increases visitor loyalty, but it will also boost your value in the eyes of search engines, which then increases your rank on their search results pages.

Bookmark this page
Speaks for itself – add a link on your site that allows them to bookmark your page (add your site to their favourites list). 

E-mail this page to a friend - click here for example
Offer your viewers the opportunity to refer your website to someone else easily and quickly.  Most of us can simply copy and paste the address bar into an email and send it to a friend if we want; but adding a link that will automatically send an email to a friend eliminates the middle step, and gives this opportunity to less computer-savvy viewers.

Add Google Analytics
Find out just how much your page is being viewed, among many other useful statistics about your website.  Add Google Analytics – a FREE service provided by Google – to your website.

QUESTIONS? 

Feel free to contact Whetham Solutions at (705) 812-6288 for more information!