Dynamic Web Site Features

PROVIDE A USEFUL SERVICE

Getting visitors to keep returning to your web site after an initial visit is key to running a successful business. Repeat customers are much more likely to spend than first time buyers and if their experience was good, they'll tell their friends. The best ways of keeping visitors attention are firstly to ensure that the contents of your site change regularly and secondly to give them something useful to remember you by.

Everyone's talking about blogs at the moment. If you don't blog you're missing a valuable opportunity to market yourself and your company. If your blogs are interesting and change on a regular basis, people will want to read them and will bookmark them and tell their friends. If you provide an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) link to your blog then readers can study the abstract of your latest missive and decide whether or not to read more. The key of course is content. If it's not interesting it won't be read and you will be wasting your time. On the other hand, the best bloggers make a living from the advertizing displayed alongside their blogs and they do it as a full time job. These are the journalists of the new age. The decline of printed newspapers will continue in favour of on line news and comment.

If you're not a budding author or journalist and noone in your company is either, don't despair. The alternative to a regular blog is some useful tool you can display on your web site to encourage people to keep coming back. The tool should be relevant to your company's expertise or products of course and should preferably provide a service that's not easily available anywhere else. I have implemented a unit conversion tool on this website because it's the sort of thing I use in every day engineering calculations. OK I know there are hundreds of other unit conversion tools out there so what makes mine better? I'll let you try it out and then you can tell me if you think I've wasted my time developing it.

And that's the other way of providing a useful dynamic feature. Set up a discussion board or other publicly available feedback mechanism and let your customers talk about your company's products or services. Don't be worried about negative feedback. It's much better to calmly answer user complaints in a public forum than it is to censor them. If you believe in what you're doing, and you are really interested in customer service it will pay back in the end.