The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 28: Appeal to Wants Instead of Needs

Television advertising does it to us all the time. We make jokes about the many prescription drug commericals, but they wouldn’t keep making them if they weren’t successful.

And how do they start out?

A restless woman tosses and turns in her bed. We remember that feeling of not being able to get to sleep. We know we probably don’t have a severe problem, most of us are getting enough sleep to function. But the commercial reminds us by the time it’s over how wonderful it is to have seven to nine hours of restful, rejuvenating sleep. Ahhh.

So how is that appealing to wants, and not needs? After all, everyone needs sleep or they’ll start to hallucinate and eventually die.

It’s the same with your business, if you think about it. Your clients probably need to take a break from working. But they don’t just want to take a few days off to stay at home, they want a vacation. To sell to them, you can’t just tell them they need to take a break, or that they might as well spend those use-them-or-lose-them vacation days at a luxury destination.

Instead, you want to find the need, and fulfill it by giving them the wants, the benefits, what’s in it for them.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number : Keep Your Sticky Plan Simple.

Now that we’ve established how important it is to have a sticky site, what can you do to get the stickiness going?

A great many things. But first, we have to go over the most important point again.

You’ll want to pick one or two ways for your site to be sticky and build on them. Once you have three or four ways to make your site stickier, unless you are starting a resource or community site rather than a commercial site, you will probably want to build another site.

To create a sticky site, you can do up to three of the following activities at once:

• Constantly add new content with a blog, an RSS feed, or a directory of your own articles.
• Give them a way to return to your site on every page - there should be a link to your RSS feed or newsletter on every page of the site. You’ll want to send out an update at least monthly, but weekly or daily is best if you can.
• Make sure your copy is readable and easy to understand. Use bullets and headlines throughout copy to draw attention. Less than 20% of your paragraphs on web pages should be more than four sentences long.
• Build interaction into your site. If you have a blog, allow comments. Forums should be moderated and all topics should be answered within a time frame that matches the action of the community.
• Provide as many resources as you can. Not all of these resources need to be on another site, or be free. In fact, for some sites it is better if there are just a few areas of free content, such as articles or blog entries.

Stickiness is important enough for your site and your business for you to consult an expert if any of these suggestions don’t fit your site. Fill out the form below to drop me a line, and remember to reference this post. I’d be happy to talk with you.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 26: Plan to Keep Your Part of the Web Sticky.

The concept of “stickiness” has evolved from a simple concept to the philosophy of the future web. A “sticky” site is one that can keep a visitor on the site longer, and/or keep them coming back more often, preferably both. With the evolution of the static World Wide Web to Web 2.0, it’s becoming more important to build a site that isn’t just an online catalog.

The hardest part of keeping visitors on your site longer isn’t actually finding a way to keep them entertained. It seems that way at first, but once you pick a concept, building on it and keeping it as simple as possible is usually enough to keep the stickiness going. It’s more of an issue to keep the execution of the idea simple, rather than creating multiple solutions that confuse your visitors.

We’ll talk about simple changes you can make in order to have a sticky site next.

Nina

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