I'd like your help at finding ways to get visitors to my website to spend more
time there.
I have had great success at finding ways to drive traffic to my site. What I
have not had much success with is getting visitors to view more of the pages on
my site once they are visiting at all. The average number of pages each visitor
views has stayed remarkably constant for at least a year and a half.
I'm a software consultant. My primary objective with my website is to get
people who come to read any of the pages to continue by reading my homepage, my
"About GoingWare" page, my resume, and my contact info.
My ultimate objective is really to get people who visit my site to call or email
me to inquire about having me do some consulting for them. I'd like to find
things I can do to improve my website that will generate more sales inquiries
from the pages I already have. My experience has been that about a third of my
income results from contracts with clients who found me through my website. The
rest comes from personal referrals. There's not a whole lot I can do to
stimulate more referral business (at least no short-term ways), so improving
sales through my website could do me a world of good.
A secondary objective is to get people who visit my website to give me a link
from their own pages.
I used the Analog webserver log file analyzer (http://www.analog.cx/) to give me
such statistics as distinct hosts served, total HTML pages served, and the
number of times each of the sales-oriented pages like my resume has been served.
I have data for each month for the last eighteen months.
The happy news is that my overall traffic is growing steadily and significantly.
Also, although only a small fraction of the visitors read my "About GoingWare"
or contact pages, the proportion of visitors who read them has also been
growing. However, I attribute that to the improvement in the economy - while
the economy is still ailing, it's a lot better now than it was a year and a half
ago, so there are more potential clients out looking for consultants.
What I don't see is any significant change in the number of pages viewed by each
visitor. If I divide the total number of pages served by the distinct hosts
served, it stays pretty close to 2.5 for the entire eighteen month period.
The ratio ranges from 2.1 to 3.0; the high value came when I promoted an article
that consists of about a dozen HTML pages, so having people read all the pages
in the article drove up the average. It seems that when I promote a new article
that consists of just one HTML page, the ratio actually drops for a month or so,
because most visitors read that one page but none of the others. If I ignore
the data affected by these two phenomena, the range stays between 2.2 and 2.8,
and doesn't seem to respond to anything I do to my website.
What is ratio of pages per distinct host for your site? Is my value of 2.5
typical? If you respond with the figure for your site, please give your URL so
I can have a look.
(The way I drive traffic to my website is to write articles that people like to
read, mostly tips on software development but about other topics too. Many
people link to these articles so my site is ranked well by the search engines.)
The one thing I know might help my retention is to get my website redesigned. I
did all the markup myself over a period of about five years, and it's both very
plain and not very consistently designed. I'm having Tuckamore Studios
(http://www.tuckamorestudios.com/) redesign the site; the designer has a very
nice concept for my new look.
I gave her a list of the pages on my site that generate 80% of the traffic on my
site. This comes to 40 pages out of 120 pages total. When she's got these
pages redesigned, I'm going to take my new design live, and I should be able to
tell in a week or so if her new design is improving my stats at all.
You can see my designer's concept for my new site at:
http://www.goingware.com/newsite/
She's actually improved the design a bit beyond what you see there. We've
rewritten the body copy for my homepage, and used a flat light gray background
for the body instead of the pattern, as lots of people complained that the
pattern made the text hard to read. The title bar still has the patterned
background.
Compare this to my current design (which I did myself) at:
http://www.goingware.com/
I can see how having a professionally designed site will get potential clients
to take me more seriously. But will it make most visitors stay longer?
One reason I want every website visitor to read more of my pages, not just
potential clients, is that I hope to get visitors to give me links. If visitors
are attracted to explore more of my site, the likelihood is greater that they'll
come across something they want to link to.
The new site design is entirely XHTML 1.0 strict with cascading stylesheets.
This allows my designer to do a lot nicer job for most modern browsers than
could be done without using stylesheets. It also makes my pages load faster.
Unfortunately, some older browsers won't render the pages well; 14% of my
visitors still use Internet Explorer 5.0, which I've already seen does a bad job
of rendering my new design. However, I figure that few of the people with older
browsers are going to be potential clients. My designer is working out a way to
have older browsers render the page intelligibly even when CSS support in the
browser is broken.
My current site is a mix of DTDs, with some of the older and less popular pages
not having a DOCTYPE at all. I do a lot of layout using tables. The most
popular pages all validate, but most of them are HTML 4.01 transitional. I've
been using stylesheets only in a minor way, with presentation being controlled
both by tags and by CSS.
Probably the worst problem with my current site is how inconsistent the pages
are. Some pages use my patterned background, some use a lightly colored
background, but the colors aren't consistent from page to page. Not all the
pages have navigation bars, there are different styles of navigation bars, and
there are some pages on my site that can't be reached easily (or at all) by
links from other pages on my site. There are a few pages (although mostly
unimportant ones) that can only be reached by search engines or links on other
sites.
It's easy to see that Tuckamore Studios' work is going to improve my site design
dramatically, and I think make it a lot more pleasant for visitors to spend time
there. But will it get them to read more of my pages?
Is there anything I can tell my designer that she can do to improve my
statistics? Are there any websites or books that address this issue?
Thanks for your help.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford DeleteThis @goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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