1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations building up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

However, despite the vast amount of detailed information that can be collected what will always be missing is information that will tell the webmaster exactly what the visitor was thinking. Did they dislike the site? Was the layout clear or confusing? Was it easy to navigate the website and were they able to find the information they wanted?

A website may be generating sales but why are there some people that are visiting the website and not buying anything? Was the reason because they didn’t like what was being offered, or was it that they couldn’t find what they wanted even though it was there?

Website surveys provide webmasters with an excellent and accurate method of answering these types of questions. Direct feedback from the website visitors cuts to the chase, no need to guess, just ask the visitors themselves how they found the site and if they found what they were looking for.

With an online survey webmasters can find out:-

• How often do people visit the website?
• How did they reach the website?
• Is their interest in the website for reasons of business or pleasure?
• Did they find the information they were looking for?
• How easy did they find navigating the website?
• Would they recommend the website to others?

A good website survey will be short and to the point and gather good intelligence that once analysed will help improve the website.

An alternative to a more traditional customer survey would be to ask just one or two questions at strategic points. For example, ask visitors at the end of the registration process if they found the procedure quick and easy; or after ordering an item ask if they found the ordering procedure and payment methods straightforward. To ensure that the questions don’t become repetitive to regular visitors the website can be programmed so that the questions are only asked once per registered user.

Website surveys take the mystery out of working out what visitors think of a website and using Online Survey Software they are quick and easy to design and once implemented will really become the webmaster’s assistant.

To see a sample website survey please follow the link: Sample Website Survey

The team at Pixel Design Studio are pleased to announce their latest creation; the Ugly Cars website designed and created for The Ugly Car Company, a local taxi firm based in Sussex. The site has been a total success for both Pixel Design Studio and The Ugly Car Company, generating plenty of hype for the new business and picking up Pixel Design studio their first web design award. (Well 3 actually! )

After completing the site, we were so pleased with the results we thought we would submit it to No Limit Media, a web design award site that acknowledges well constructed websites. After receiving the award we thought why not do some digging about and find out if there were any other organisations that accredited web designers for their work.

Well that was a few weeks ago and we have now picked up 3 awards including a Gold World Wide Web Award from the American Association of Webmasters. We were extremely pleased with this award due to their strict judging and scoring system. The awards they currently offer are:

• Humanitarian  Award
• Patriotic Award
• Bronze Award
• Silver Award
• Gold Award
• The Platinum Award

Ok so we didn’t quite make the Platinum award but hey, it put a smile on our faces

 We also picked up the ‘Marketme‘ webmaster award, another award that requires your site to meet a strict criteria in order to win.

John.