Sticky Websites

Websites should have the same attributes as a beautiful woman or handsome hunk: they should be desirable and charismatic as well as possessing the kind of magnetism that makes you stick around.

Would you describe your website that way? Sounds kind of like a mission impossible, doesn't it?

Easier Than You Think

Achieving a website that's desirable is probably easier than transforming oneself into a raving beauty when you weren't born one. The desirability of a website, its stickiness, to use a term coined by Thomas H. Davenport, Professor of Management Systems at Boston University, in an article he wrote for CIO Magazine, is “a measure of how much attention a website gets over time.”

Measurement Details

This “stickiness” is measured by either or both of these ways: how long a visitor stays on a website and/or how often that visitor returns to that site. The longer a visitor stays, the stickier the website is considered. The more often the visitor returns to that site, the stickier the website.

Why Bother?

I'll answer this from two viewpoints.

If you're a writer, you want to entice people to your website in order to promote yourself and your writing. You want them to stay on your site because you want them to get to know you, to like you, and to think maybe I'd enjoy reading what they write. Of course, you hope that they will buy your book or request it from the library (that results in one or more sales) and to tell others about your books or articles and website thus increasing the visitors to your website.

If you're in business, it's a no-brainer why you want to make your site sticky. The more people who come to your site, the more the chances that they will buy something. The longer they stay on your site, again, the more the chances that they will buy. Sure, you want them to tell others about your site and products also.

So, whether you're a writer or a business selling thingamajigs, you want your site to be sticky. Check back to learn the techniques you can use to make that happen.

Takeaway Truth

Website desirability or stickiness can be created using the right techniques.