Peanut butter and jelly. So tasty, so sweet and so sticky! Make your website like that and you are on your way to having a successful website. A Sticky website is a website that keep visitors around for longer, that make them view more pages and a website that get them to come back for more. It should be said that this will be a good thing for most websites but not for all.

So let’s have a look at how you can make your website more sticky. I’m going to look at some of the things you can do, if you have a content site, like a blog, but you can use it across other types of websites as well.
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Inline form validation is a great usability feature that helps ensure that your visitor don’t fill out your forms incorrectly and submit just to be prompted with a message, that they have forgot a @ in their email address by making the the validation process happen while or just after they type something in a form.

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I’ve tried out a couple of different CMS systems lately and have had a chance to look at the back-end of some rather small, local sites. And boy there’s a lot of different ways to go about giving clients access. Some of them have full access to every corner of the CMS and some aren’t even able to make new pages or content elements.  My question is are you providing a user-friendly solution to your clients? Do your clients agree with your answer?
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First impressions, they are a bitch ain’t they? Everybody has had a bad day when they are not looking their best at a party or an event. And then there’s that feeling. The feeling that no matter what you say, no matter what you do, people are going to keep looking at you funny, like you are not the fastest moped on the harbour, like you are a loser. Guess what, people can give your website that look too.
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Page speed is all the rage right now. And although wordpress is a fast blogging platform, it can get really bloated, really quick. With all the free plugins and themes using a lot of requests. Here are some tips to get a faster loading wordpress blog.

First Grab yourself some tools to measure the speed

Get yourself some tools to test your speed.
Yahoo’s Yslow, Firebug firefox extension, google pagespeed are just some of the speed tools out there. Try them out to see which one you like.

Backup everything!

Make yourself a backup of all your WordPress files and you database. Just to be save

And lets get on with it.
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Have you ever been to a website and had a hard time finding the product that would be the best for your needs? Have you checked lately that you aren’t making the same mistake on your own site? You really should. It might be really easy for you to decide which product is the best, but are you part of your own target audience? Often you won’t be. I have a few examples for you from the web hosting business. A business where people need to compare different packages.

Let’s start with one of the worst examples I could find. Laughing Squid

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Does your website have sign up forms? Are the validated as the user enters their data? They should be. There is nothing worse than signing up for a forum, a web app or an online service, pressing the Sign up or buy button and then seeing a little red line saying your phone number is too short, or your user name is taken. Or, god forbid, getting prompted by an annoying little popup box.
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Have you ever had a moment, where you thought: Doh! That’s why My traffic isn’t converting, or that’s why all my visitors bounce. Well that’s what this series of posts will be about. Read the rest of this entry »