Re: Increasing page views per visit

From: Bahman Eslamboly <lawtalk_at_lawguru.com>
Date: Tue 19 Oct 1999 23:26:57 -0700

JANET ATTARD WROTE:
>Has anyone done any studies (or seen any printed) on what
>methods work best to get visitors to find more areas of
>interest on an individual site? Some of the questions I'm
>pondering as we get ready to make some changes on a couple
>of my own sites are:
>
>Are navbars on the top better than the side? Should a top
>navbar get repeated on the bottom? Does having navbars both
>at the top and the side confuse people? Do links to related
>stories work better than navbar-type category references? Do
>users get annoyed if you break stories up into short pages
>that don't scroll much and require clicking on an arrow to
>get to the next page in the story? Are users more likely to
>click on text links in a navbar than on buttons? (Or do most
>sites use the text links primarily as a way of getting found
>in search engines? If a single company has several related
>sites (a group of magazines might be an example), does it
>confuse or annoy visitors to link from one site to the other
>? Forgetting search engine issues for a moment, does using
>frames (set up so they don't make users feel boxed in) make
>it easier or more difficult to navigate a site without the
>visitors getting lost?

Hello -

I have not seen any studies myself, but I can speak from my
personal experiences.

I think that you should try to design your navigation based
on the type of site and / or the particular section of your
site. For example if you are on a page that is selling
something, you should limit the navigation and try to guide
your user to where you want them to go i.e. the order page.
"Too many navigational links", banners and / or buttons on
those pages could simply serve as an "temptation" for the
user to go somewhere else.

I heard a very successful web site operator talking at a
seminar about his philosophy with regards to navigation bars
and links - he said: "Don't use any. This will force the
user to click on banners which hopefully will sell
something". Of course he was an adult web site operator ;-)

Personally I try to follow a couple of rules with respect to
navigation on our sites. I try to: (a) give as much
navigation choices as possible to the user to allow them to
go to most major sections of our site; (b) I try to keep the
navigation as consistent as possible from section to section
(and pages within each section); (c) try to give top and
bottom navigation (sometimes also from left). The exception
is from pages where I want to guide people to a certain
place or result i.e. question forms, information submission
forms etc.

With respect to increasing page views per visitor, I think
that good navigation can help in increasing page views. We
have increased page views per visitor by more than 50% (from
4.5 to 6.7 pages per person) on our LawGuru.com site (
http://www.lawguru.com/ ). Two months ago we increased page
views per visitor on our WebSiteBroker.com site (
http://www.websitebroker.com/ ) from 4.6 to 7.5 with just a
couple of simple design changes which mainly involved
breaking up longer pages into smaller ones. Users did not
seem to mind this at all and in fact many thought that the
content was easier to navigate because they did not have to
scroll too much. Increased page views also translates into
an increased amount of time spent on your web site. When
designing new sections on our sites, I now make it a point
to always think of ways on how to maximize page views and
provide clean pages and simple navigation.

Naturally, you have to know how to strike a balance between
links on your page, navigation bars / links, banners and
content break-up. I don't know if there is a fast and easy
formula and trial and error and experience with YOUR site
and visitors will play a major role in how you do it.

Bahman Eslamboly
Attorney at Law
Los Angeles, California

LawGuru.com - http://www.lawguru.com
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e-mail:lawtalk_at_lawguru.com




Received on Wed Oct 20 1999 - 01:26:57 CDT