PART 2: How to keep Web surfers on your site


Last week, we told you which three critical points your Web site must pass before Web surfers even consider taking a look at your Web page. This week, we're telling you what you can do to keep these visitors on your site.

1. Come straight to the point
Your home page is the most important page on your site. It's the very first page of your site and the page that people see first when they come to your site. Therefore, it's important that your home page is interesting for your visitors.
Every visitor wants to get a prompt answer to the question "what's in it for me?". On the first paragraph of your home page, you should tell your visitors the following:


what you do
why people should stay on your site
what's in for your visitors
If you don't answer these questions quickly enough, people will go away.
Of course, every home page owner is convinced that they have the best product on earth and that everybody should buy it. Unfortunately, visitors don't know that.
If you don't tell them the major benefits of your product, no one will take the time to dig into your site. Web surfers are a very impatient group.

2. Don't annoy your visitors with animations they cannot see
Some people use Flash animations or big pictures with a meaningless text such as "Welcome to the world of tomorrow" as their index page that redirects to their actual first page. Don't do that if you don't want to lose a big part of your visitors.
Flash intros take minutes to load on a slow modem connection so most Web surfers will go away before they even had a chance to see your actual home page.
In addition, Web pages containing only a Flash animation cannot be indexed by most search engines. If you use a Flash intro as your index page, chances are that your site will never show up on search engines.

3. Respect people's time
Until high-speed Internet access becomes widespread, don't use large bandwidth-clogging graphics.
As a rule of thumb, no single graphic should be larger than 30 KB to 50 KB, and no single page should have more than 200 KB of graphics.
If you must include a large, detailed image, provide your visitors a smaller, thumbnail version so they know if seeing the larger image is worth their time.

4. Test with different Web browsers
Not all Web surfers use Microsoft's Internet Explorer in version 6. It's important to test your Web site with different Web browsers.
Try to test your Web site with Internet Explorer version 5.0, Mozilla/Netscape and Opera.

5. Be consistent
Professional Web sites always have their navigational bar at the same side. They use a consistent style for headlines, headers and text. Don't use more than three different fonts in different sizes.
Try to avoid colored or textured backgrounds. They make text difficult to read. Of course, dancing buttons and blinking text don't belong to a professional Web site, either.
Once Web surfers have decided not to go away on their first impulse, you have to keep them with a good sales copy.

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