Top ten ways to get visitors to click past your homepage.

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  1. Make Everything Clickable-- The only way theyll be able to click past your homepage is if you give them something to click on. It may sound stupidly easy, but its an easy mistake to overlook. If a user waves a mouse over your front page, it should pass through many clickable icons and links. Maximize (to an aesthetically pleasing level) the screen real estate of your homepage with hyperlinks.
  2. Make it Look Clickable-- Dont assume people know where to click. Often Web designers will create imagemaps with multiple hotzones. These hotzones are hyperlinks to different areas of the site. The trouble with hotzones and imagemaps is that their clickability is not obvious. In many cases, the only way to tell where to click is by slowly waving the cursor over the imagemap. Make it obvious from the first look. Inviting design techniques like raised icons and obvious menus make it easy for people to understand where they should click.
  3. Click Here-- In the early days of the Webs popularity, visitors were still a little confused as to what elements on a webpage were actually clickable. In order to clear up the confusion, links and icons were labeled with the phrase Click Here. Although many sites have dropped this phrase altogether, the suggestive nature of a Click Here does, in fact, cause people to do just that. It may sound cheesy, but it still works. Sometimes people just need to be told where to click.
  4. Showcase new products-- If its new and hot, people want to hear about it. Dont believe me? Check out your local video store. Notice that the new releases always get the best placement. Do the same for your website.
  5. Top of the page-- Put your best stuff at the top of the page. If you want people to go to it, let them find it-- easily. Beyond hot products, make sure menus are easily accessible at the top of the page too. Ideally, upon seeing your front page, you want visitors to click, not scroll. If they scroll, that means theres nothing at the top of the page that interests them.
  6. Enticing headlines-- Bet you the reason you clicked on this article is because it said, Top Ten Ways to.... Want an idea on how to write a flashy headline? Pick up any copy of The New York Post.
  7. No unnecessary pages-- Start pages and Flash-enabled front pages may look cool, but they are just one more barrier to entry into your store. With every level you add before your homepage, you WILL lose visitors. Dont give them a chance to leave. Remove all unnecessary front pages.
  8. Keep it small-- Not everyone gets to access the Web via a T-1 line. Most access the Web on a 56K modem or lower. If those surfers have to wait for the first page to load, theyre not going to be so patient for the subsequent pages. Although there is some liberty to make it a tad larger, a good rule of thumb is keep total page size, with images, under 30K.
  9. Keep it fresh-- Let visitors know your site is fresh with the latest news, new products, new designs, and a Last Updated indicator. If its new, people want to know about it. Plus, your active interest in your site will stimulate visitors interest as well.
  10. Study the log reports-- You can guess all you want as to where you think your visitors will go, but nothing is more telling than what they actually do. Find that information by studying your log reports. A log report, generated by a log analyzer like Webtrends, will tell you where people are going and not going within your site. From this information, youll be able to determine the combination of words, images, and their placement that attracts the most attention.

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