A Temporal Pattern from
Patterns for Personal Web Sites

Reward Return Visitors

Q: Why should we care about return visitors?

A: They're your most loyal audience. They have taken the time to explore your site, and find it useful or interesting enough to return to. By rewarding this loyalty, you'll increase your site's audience.

Therefore, give visitors a reason to return to your site.

The predominant way to reward return visitors is to offer them a Living Site that constantly offers new content. Freshness Dates and a History Page indicate changes to visitors.

This pattern also influences new visitors. If they see that the site rewards return visits, they are more likely to return.

A few people will become so familiar with your site that they'll type URLs in manually, rather than navigating through your site. Make this easy by giving pages Guessable URLs, as well as Unchanging URLs.



Last updated 17 June 2002
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/reward.return.visitors.html
All contents ©2002 Mark L. Irons