Read Cody Moya’s featured article on “Using Clean Content Design to Improve Your Website Stickiness”.


Cody Moya’s featured article is reprinted here.

******

Using Clean Content Design to Improve Your Website Stickiness

Have you ever watched someone use your website? Do they seem to find what they want right away and either click it or start scrolling down?

Or do they get distracted, sidetracked, have trouble and ultimately get bored?

If your answer is the second, you’ve got a problem.

Fixing Your Website

Whether your website is hard to read, too wordy, too laden with images, or just laid out poorly, you can fix it. Website stickiness is the quality to a website that holds viewers there, encouraging them with one-more-interesting-item to remain at your website; the longer they stick to your website, the better your chances of making some money.

Just like with tape, your website’s stickiness is better if it’s not cluttered with other stuff. If you’re running other people’s banner ads on your site, now is the time to stop. Banner ads are distracting and often unpredictable.

With slow computer speeds, the ones with multiple animations (you know who you are, Low Rates!) will lock up a page so that it doesn’t load at all.

Worse, if you’re selling ad space on your website to a service that sends up ads to random but similar services, you may be advertising competitors on your website without knowing it – even if the service promises this won’t happen!

So eliminate the banners now. If you have large graphics (anything that is larger than 50 K is large), animations, or Flash, lose them now, or move them off your home page.

Use the simplest possible web design: a menu across the top, a menu across the bottom, and three columns between the menus, keeping the bulk of your content in the center column, where most people look. Don’t use huge graphics at the top of the page.

Newspapers have a philosophy called above-the-fold. This means that the real estate of the paper on the front page above the fold should hold the best and most important stories in the paper.

Similarly, you should keep your most important real estate above the fold – in the part of your page that shows up on the screen after the page has been downloaded, and before any scrolling happens. This is why people like banner ads – that’s the most valuable part of your page. Don’t give it away.

In that crucial top part of your page, you should have:

– A navigational menu
– Your logo, kept small and preferably in the top left corner
– A title that will hook your viewer
– The first part of your site’s content

Besides this content, you should have – white space. Look at the bulleted points above. They stand out nicely against the rest of the text, right? You see them long before the items in the middle of any given paragraph. That’s because bullets are designed to take advantage of white space.

Your most important points should always be surrounded by white space.

Color and Design

White space doesn’t necessarily mean your site should be white; in fact, white backgrounds are sometimes harder to read. Choose light colors for the background of your site, and make sure your font is legible on more than one computer with more than one browser.

If you’ve done everything recommended up to this point, your home page should consist of:

– A menu at the top of the page
– Content right down the middle
– A second menu or more information down the left side of the page
– Room for a sidebar or ads down the right side of the page
– A second menu or room for information about you and your business along the bottom of the page.

Each of these items should be separated from the others clearly by significant white space or by a graphic line. You shouldn’t get any fancier than that.

If you have items or sidebars you want to offset from the rest of the site, you can use a different background color that doesn’t contrast harshly with your main color – yellows often work well for this. Break up long articles, and if you have big chunks of paragraphs, try to break them into smaller paragraphs.

Most importantly, you don’t need any bells or whistles for your site at all. Keep it simple.

Once your site’s been cleaned up, have someone try to browse it while you watch. If they have an easier time finding what they’re seeking, you’ve done your job right.

Keep Them Coming Back: Fresh Content Every Week

Once you’ve got a pretty site, though, customer loyalty still isn’t guaranteed. Why? Because what people are looking for is content. The Internet is all about information.

But if you’re the average busy webmaster, you don’t have the time to write tons of fresh content on a weekly or even monthly basis to post to each site you manage. The answer to this: private label rights articles you can get for example at www.YourOwnArticles.com .

These are articles purchased in bulk that contain good content for your website, and that are pre-optimized for your keywords. Once you purchase them, you own private label rights rights. You can add or delete text, change text, customize it for your website, even publish them on your site or others with your name listed as the author.

The cleanest website won’t get your customers to keep coming to you. But great, regularly-published, fresh content will.

Here For Your Success

Cody Moya

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts course on Article Marketing. You can sign up for his free Article Marketing Course and get additional information at his website: http://www.articlemarketingcourse.com

******

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Cody Moya for granting permission to reprint this article.

 

 

 

 

Sharing is caring