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!!!