The ISMS Award Scheme  - tips on maintaining interest

The site content must be of such quality and interest that visitors will want to return again and again.

  • The site must be regularly updated to ensure relevance and continued interest. If a site is visited once and everything in it can be see and absorbed by the visitor on that one occasion then, generally, they will not return. Keep the site fresh and interactive with regular updates, new items, polls, forums, award schemes and perhaps gifts or downloads. Promote additions and amendments though an 'updates' page.

  • Provide contact information. Visitors may wish to contact you for a number of reasons: requesting information or clarification, with comments or suggestions about the site, to inform you of broken links and so on. Contact links provided regularly around the site should take visitors to an email address such as ours (email the ISMS), or links to a guestbook or feedback form. All will help to maintain a user friendly site and could well help to inform future site development.

  • A guest book will allow visitors to leave comments about, and perhaps suggestions to improve, the site. Remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and visitors should be reminded to exercise caution when deciding whether or not to disclose personal information in a guest book. If the site runs an award scheme it should not be a requirement for applicants to sign the guest book before being considered for an award.

  • The site must load quickly. Visitors will become irritated if kept waiting to access the site. Even a load time of 30 seconds or so can seem like a lifetime when you've nothing else to do but wait. Exceptions to this may be awards pages or other special pages that contain large amounts of graphics. Even so, keep load time wasters such as large or animated graphics or music files to a minimum - especially on the home or index page.

  • The Chairman has a special award of bonus points for sites with that 'something extra' in visitors' maintaining interest.

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