{"id":105,"date":"2006-07-31T13:59:47","date_gmt":"2006-07-31T18:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2006\/website-stickyness\/"},"modified":"2006-08-01T16:54:15","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T21:54:15","slug":"website-stickyness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2006\/website-stickyness\/","title":{"rendered":"How &#8216;sticky&#8217; is your website?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I am talking about &#8216;stickiness&#8217; (in the context of a website,) I am talking about how long and how often people visit your website.<\/p>\n<p>When you have a real &#8216;sticky&#8217; website, people will spend more time on it, come back often and will bookmark (add to favorites) your site.<\/p>\n<p>If your website is not sticky, it&#8217;s almost pointless to make any effort to get traffic to it.<\/p>\n<p>WHAT CAN YOU DO TO MAKE A WEBSITE STICKIER?<\/p>\n<p>It comes down to a few things:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Keep the website layout simple.<\/li>\n<li>Keep the website layout consistent throughout the site.<\/li>\n<li>Have concise and clear writing.<\/li>\n<li>Have interesting and entertaining content.<\/li>\n<li>Stay on topic.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I think the first 4 points speak for themselves &#8211; we all know that you should have your &#8216;home&#8217; button and other navigational elements in the same spot on each page &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>That said, I think point #5 needs to be expanded on a little.<\/p>\n<p>WHY STAYING ON TOPIC IS KEY.<\/p>\n<p>One mistake website owners can make, is to try and cover many diverging topics on the same website. This may seem like a good idea, but all it does is confuse your visitors, presents a bigger challenge in terms of organizing the content and finally, it dilutes search engine traffic.<\/p>\n<p>I AM GUILTY OF THIS ERROR<\/p>\n<p>I knew about staying on topic years ago and because of this, I started creating micro-sites that were topic specific. But then, I went nuts &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Killersites.com started to grow in all kinds of directions &#8230; soon I had:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PHP articles<\/li>\n<li>Photo galleries<\/li>\n<li>Web design articles<\/li>\n<li>Web site monitoring<\/li>\n<li>Page Rank meters<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230; and all kinds of other stuff.<\/p>\n<p>I should have kept it clean and simple and concentrated on the thing that killersites.com was all about: web design and creating killer websites.<\/p>\n<p>MICRO-SITES<\/p>\n<p>Because of the content-creep found in killersites (it has too much stuff buried in deep dark holes,) I&#8217;ve started to create my new and topic specific micro-sites.<\/p>\n<p>Each web site deals with a particular topic and does not diverge.  So far I have these websites out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"PHP Videos for web designers\" href=\"HTTP:\/\/www.killerphp.com\">www.killerphp.com<\/a> -> teaches web designers php.<\/li>\n<li>www.killerajax.com -> teaches you how to use ajax.<\/li>\n<li>www.killeractionscript -> teaches, yep &#8230; Flash Actionscript.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230; I still also have the classics:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>www.how-to-build-websites.com<\/li>\n<li>www.csstutorial.net<\/li>\n<li>www.secretsites.com<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>MICRO-SITES ARE &#8216;STICKIER&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>To prove my point, I can share one very interesting web statistic with you: the percentage of people who bookmark my websites.<\/p>\n<p>Consider these numbers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>killersites.com -> 18%<\/li>\n<li>how-to-build-websites.com -> 33%<\/li>\n<li>killerphp.com -> 90%<\/li>\n<li>csstutorial.net -> 92%<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are many factors that go into affecting these numbers, but a major factor is found in the focus of the content.<\/p>\n<p>For example:<\/p>\n<p>The majority of people bookmark (add to favorites,) killerphp.com because the website is ONLY about php &#8230; and that&#8217;s why they are there.<\/p>\n<p>Contrast this to killersites.com, where a relatively small number of people bookmark it &#8230; we get too many people looking for too many different things &#8230; the content is too divergent.<\/p>\n<p>MAKING KILLERSITES.COM STICKIER<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not going to be easy, but I am now cleaning things up, moving things to micro-sites, simplifying the pages &#8211; sometimes spring-cleaning comes in late summer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I am talking about &#8216;stickiness&#8217; (in the context of a website,) I am talking about how long and how often people visit your website. When you have a real &#8216;sticky&#8217; website, people will spend more time on it, come back often and will bookmark (add to favorites) your site. If your website is not &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}