Entice Your Users to Interact
The purpose of majority of the web sites is to keep the visitor happy. Once online, your visitors cannot see you face to face immediately, nor can they talk to you. The only way they can interact with you at the moment is to browse your site, and read what you have to say. Imagine being at a local store, where you see no workers, but machines everywhere. You scan your items, you pay, and you leave. No one offers you any discount, no one offers you any smile, and no one greets you or says goodbye to you. That would feel weird, wouldn’t it?
In the same way, the days are gone when internet users came to a site that offered no way to contact the author, and even more strange, no way to let the user offer any suggestion or advice related to the content posted on the site. Today, a successful site should work just like a retail store, or even a local coffee shop. You should do the following three things to make sure your visitor has a good experience at your site:
- Enable your visitors to interact with you via email
- Allow them to leave comments
- Let them interact with other visitors and users on the site.
The first and foremost thing you should do if you wish to interact with your users is to have a your email address listed prominently on your site, or having a form on your site that allows people to email you through that form. You can offer your email address on its own contact page, the way we let you contact us on our site here. Another alternative is to offer your users an easy way to email you; a PHP form should be very easy install, and that will allow you to give your visitors a chance to send you email directly from your web site, without launching any special programs.
The second way to let your visitors stay and participate with you is to allow them to leave comments. This is critical if you are running a personal site; people do not like reading other peoples’ personal lives without actually being able to participate. If the software you use to write on your site allows comments, turn on the comments feature. If you do not have that feature, don’t worry; use something like HaloScan, which allows you to let your visitors leave comments on your site, and it doesn’t cost you anything to use. Last, but not least, the third way allows your users and visitors to interact between themselves. You do this through scripts called forums, which are intended to have discussions that can be started by everyone. One of the most popular, and free, software for this is phpBB. Another good and nice looking script for this is Vanilla, which JErm here has already introduced to you before.
Once you have done all of this, the only thing to do is to relax and actually pay attention to the comments and posts left by your visitors. Good luck!
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