Creative Themes Design

Creative Themes Design to Keep Visitors Longer

07/12/2010  |  Category: Blog, Creative Designs  |  135 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

Everyone wants to have a website which visitors would love to spend time on & would love to come back to. Visitors must find what they are looking for, quickly, easily & find the information helpful.

An effective design would help any visitor find content easily & would be able to hand-hold them into doing something specific – like enroll in a campaign, buy something from the website, download a PDF document or even refer the website to another person.

Here are a few creative design tips to help do just that.

Keep a Clean Effective Navigation

• website visitors should be able to move between posts & pages easily, preferably in 2 – 3 clicks of the mouse. It is also an effective design to limit main navigation to only the pages or posts that help you achieve your goals directly (like enrollment)
• always have a customized 404 page with the main navigation so that when a visitor lands on a page that is no longer there, they have a few options to choose from rather than closing the browser window
• have some key links in the footer, links to your “About” page or “Sitemap” could take up prime space on the main navigation. Instead such pages could be listed lower in the page

Use the Prime Real Estate for Calls to Action

• use heat-maps for your designs to place calls to action on the prime real estate of your web page
• use the most-frequented regions of your website to place links to your key content. Its a good idea to limit the number of links limited to about 3 – 5

Use Simple Technology to Guide Visitors to Links of Interest

• “Related Content” is a great way to help visitors find similar content. There are numerous WordPress plugins available to do that. You can also use simple cookies to recall the pages the visitor had been to in their last visit. This creates a nice “personalization” on the website
• create custom links to pages that help you meet the website’s purpose & display them in effective places on your pages

Make it Easy for Visitors to Share your Content

• provide visitors with the ability to share content on their Facebook pages, Twitter etc. There are WordPress plugins that will create nice “Email this Page” & “Print this Page” icons on all your pages
• create a custom contact form & keep it visible. You would be surprised how effective these forms are. Most of the inquiries you will get in email can be converted, unlike Comments that spammers use to get back-links
• display your social network icons so that visitors can follow you or add you to their favorite lists

It is also a good idea to look into past data – website analytics information to understand if you should customize any specific page, or create custom visitor paths for certain keywords.

If you are designing the website for the first time, you may need to wait for about 3 – 6 months to get you sufficient data to tweak the design further to tune it to your general visitors usage patterns.