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The definition of stickiness is the content or anything on a website that has a purpose to encourage people to stay longer and to return to a particular site. Webmasters (author/ website administrator) uses the techniques for stickiness to build a community for returning visitors. Stickiness is also important for advertisers, if your site is sticky advertisers will want to place their ads on your site. The 2 most important measurements of what a website has to offer advertisers:

1. ad views (how many times people view ads on your site)
2. The average time each visitor spends on the site (the longer a user stays on your site the longer they have to view ads)

People tend to be on a web page for roughly 30 seconds to 1 minute. Stickiness can and will keep them on your site longer. When you want people to stay on your site for a long time make sure that you don’t make it because they have a hard time figuring out how to navigate through the various activities on your site. Remember if a user gets lost, information is too hard to read or doesn’t answer key questions the users will leave!

There are several common approaches to making you site sticky:

• provide content users really want
• Allow the user to personalize the site
• Build online communities where users post info or form discussion groups
• Inviting users to place feedback in response to columnists
• Adding games/quizzes to the site
• Chat rooms
• News
• etc.

Using this information provided above, you can create a site that is not only informative but also sticky. This will allow you to create a site the people will return to and refer people to.  As well as keep users on your site for a longer time. Stickiness can be your friend or your foe it’s up to you!!!

When deciding that you are going to market you product or website online, there a few things to consider first before deciding if online marketing is the best way for you.  I stress that you should not put all of your marketing “eggs” into one basket, sometimes it’s best to use multiple marketing strategies.  People tend to be more attracted to cyberspace marketing opposed to other market areas because it requires less attention span, it’s younger, hipper, and easily accessible.  Companies use marketing online for several reasons,  the top five include  rapid presentation, easy modifications, low cost, buyer involvement and no limits to space or time. Marketing in a journal or newspaper can take weeks, or even months to get designed, printed and published. When creating an advertisement for the Internet it can be create fairly quickly. Normally you can have the ad designed and posted on the Internet the very same day.  Making a rapid presentation is a major advantage for getting your product/company name out there. When you want to change you ad that is online, it can be very simple. Usually much is not involved with these types of changes other than typing in some new copy info or uploading and positioning a new graphic image on a digital page. If you wanted to change something like a four color ad or Direct mail pieces it can be very expense, as well as time consuming.When thinking about marketing, cost is one of the largest concerns that people consider. For a magazine or journal cost given to reach a certain number of readers is measured by a formula known as CPM (cost per thousand) meaning the cost to reach one thousand people. However, for Internet advertising it is measured differently. In various cases when advertising online it can be essentially free, if you build your own BBS (bulletin board system). If you decide to go through an advertiser they may charge you as little as $50 a month for placement of your ad. Then after placement your ad may be hit (viewed) hundreds of times a day!!! Online ads offer more buyer involvement than a Direct mail campaign or magazine would.  Typically, it offers several levels of information in which prospected viewers can interact more to find the information that is of interest to them and retrieve this information immediately.  Magazines and Direct mail can also have people interact by having a reply mail letter for people to fill out or having a number for people to call to get more information.  Finally, there are no limits on space or time when your ad is online. You won’t necessarily pay more for more space online, like you would for Radio, TV or Magazines.  Some advertisers may change you buy the megabyte or according to how many pages are in your presentation. If you create you own Internet server you can place as much info as its hard drive can/will hold. 

In essence, advertising online is the new way to go. It’s faster, cheaper, and easier to update than advertising over the radio, TV, or in magazines. However like I mentioned earlier, don’t put all your money into one type of advertising. It would be in your best interest to try all different types of marketing to see what kind best fits your market.  

A web site is liked more when the user knows how to use it. When your site is easily navigated it is more liked and more referred. Usability is a quality attribute that asses how easy the user can interact with your site.  Some things to consider with usability can be but is not limited to the 5 quality components (learnability, Efficiency, memorability, Errors and satisfaction), utility, importance, and how to improve usability.  These are some of the topics that I can help to inform you on so that you can better improve your web site and it’s popularity.

The first thing that you should consider is the 5 quality components. These components are the key element to make your site more user friendly. When trying to make your site the most user friendly/ easily navigated just think about this acronym LEMES (Learnablity, Efficiency, Memorability, Errors, and Satisfaction). This acronym will help you to decide if your site has good usability. Learnability is how easily users can accomplish basic tasks when they first encounter them (i.e. filling out request forms, searching etc.).  Efficiency is when the user does accomplish the task at hand that they can do it quickly, if it takes them more than a couple of minutes to figure out how quickly they can perform this task then it probably isn’t ver efficient. Memorability, is when a user can return to your site and perform that same task after a period of time away from your site. Basically it’s how easily they can re-establish the proficiency for the task at hand. Errors is how many times a person makes a mistake on the task, how severe the mistake is during this task, and how easily the user can recover from these errors. Finally, Satisfaction which is how pleased the user will be to use your design. If you can remember LEMES when reviewing your site for usability your site can and will be user friendly enough to create stickiness (where someone will continue/ return to use your site).

Something else you can consider would be utility (design functionality). When considering this you need to ask yourself, “does my site do what the user need?”. It matters little if your site does what the user needs but does not do what the user wants, which means that Efficiency and satisfaction will be poor for your site. It also matters little when the site does what the user wants but it’s hard to get there, this means that you did not follow LEMES properly and the user will not return to your site making your stickiness not so sticky.

The importance of your site is also based from LEMES. If your website it to difficult to use, fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on a site then the user will not return to your site and they will not refer people to your site. If the user gets lost, information is hard to read, or doesn’t answer key questions then users LEAVE! Leaving is the first response for a user when they feel overwhelmed, lost, or confused.  It has been stated that the best practices call for spending about 10% of your design project budget on usability. This will double your websites desired quality metrics and almost double your intranets (this would be your side of the site that the user will not see) quality metrics.

So you already have a site up and running, but the usability is pretty bad? A good way to improve bad usability is to do user testing, the most basic but useful. Let people use your site and monitor their progress. Observe what the users do, where they succeed and where they have difficulties with the user interface.  You must allow the testers to figure out the problems on their own. If you direct them in any way the results will be contaminated and you should start over.  To find  the most important problems with your usability I suggest using 5 testers to completely cover your bases. I also suggest running small test, as opposed to 1 large test, because they are more efficient.

If you follow the steps of LEMES and keep in mind that not everyone knows how to work a website as well as others, your sites usability will be pretty good. When your sites usability is good, then your stikiness is good. This means that your site will become more effecient, more important and more attrictive.

In recent decades, the World Wide Web became the hottest new venue for marketing and selling products. It provides ease of use and increased competition, which makes for the convenience and low prices that appeal to the millions of consumers who use it. Most of these consumers search the internet using a few major search engines; Google and Yahoo! are the most commonly used. For this reason, many businesses seek to exploit the search engines as an online marketplace. There are two key approaches typically taken in Search Engine Optimitization (SEO).

The first approach is referred to as “Organic” SEO. The biggest advantage with Organic SEO is that it is free. It uses the search engines’ metacrawlers, which are commonly available to everyone. All a business has to do is post their site and the search engine robots will find it. However, there are drawbacks - the search engine’s indexing tool can take up to a year to start ranking your site and it may not rank very high with out the proper key words, inbound links for other sites etc. So hiring an SEO company or reading up on how to position your site is very important.

The second approach is called “Pay-Per-Click” (PPC). With PPC, you pay the search engine to attach your website’s advertisement to relevant searches. The price per click can vary between  $0.10 and $10.00, depending on the industry, the particular keyword, and the rank given to the advertisement. 

 How can a business decide which approach is better? There are, of course several factors to be taken into account. First of all, are the basic requirements in place - does the business have a website, and the necessary budget? Next, the budget must be compared with the business’s online marketing needs. Typically, a combination of Organic and PPC plans is desirable, and packages start as low as $500.00. However, even with more expensive packages, monthly payment plans are available which make SEO and Online Marketing affordable for a large variety of businesses.

The first thing that you should establish when in the beginning stages of building your webpage is to consider what the purpose(s) of your website may be. There are a lot of different types of designs that your website can be referred to as. You are probably thinking to yourself, what types of designs are out there, and what type of design do I want my website to be? This is a difficult decision because there are so many different kinds of sites that can be built. Some webpage’s that are out there in cyberspace are e-commerce, general (a.k.a. brochure) web design, and membership/ social networking / dating sites.

An e-commerce site is a site that allows consumers to pay for your products online with a credit card. Some examples of e-commerce sites could be Sears.com, Khols.com, or e-bay.com these sites let you shop online at your convenience. You could be shopping on a site for clothing, tools, or electronics whatever you believe you need. Once you find what you are looking for you can put the products in a “shopping cart”. Finally when you are ready to “check out” you pay for these products with your credit card. The shopping cart and credit card processing makes this web site an e-commerce web site.

If you are not looking to sell your products over the internet, another option that you can explore is a general (brochure) web design.  These web sites are good for getting your name out there, advertising and letting people know who you are. This site could be a simple 5 page site with information on who you are, what you do, and where you can provide your service/ products. These sites are a good idea not only for advertising reasons, but also because the 20^th century revolves around getting information online.  People now days do not pick up the phone book to look for services, because they can just go to yellowbook.com to find the services easily. They can also use search engines on the internet to find the product or service that they are looking for. If you do not have a web page, people might just be “passing you by” while looking for the services/products that you can provide.

Finally, your site can be a membership/ social networking / dating site. These are sites that can be for gaming, finding romance, or just entertainment purposes (myspace.com).  These types of sites can also be e-commerce, requiring membership login for a price or they can be a free membership. Usually most of the membership/social networking sites are profitable by advertising revenue, while dating sites can be profitable by membership fees.

Welcome to Web Design Quest. The goal of this blog is to help individuals and companies decide the best way to build, outsource and market their website. Many have a hard time with the initial starting point and they don’t know how to approach the first few steps of building their web site.   Often website jargon intimidates people, making it seem harder than it really might be. But I can lend a hand to help understand what you may need to know to start. As well as what types of questions individuals may possibly want to ask to better understand how web designing/designers can help.

Topics that I will be blogging about will include:

• What is web hosting and how do I choose a host.
• How search engine optimization will make your website more profitable
• Should I design or hire a designer
• How graphics effect the site
• What is usability and how to improve it
• Web site programming options

All of these topics and more will be exposed by me in next to no time. Please come back to read further about how a web site can be rewarding for you.