Can't Get Visitors off the Home Page
My web site, The Web Server Times, has been running for several months now and I receive approx. 130 visitors per day. The problem is that most of them go to the home page and then leave!
The visitor traffic to the home page is 6 to 7 times greater than the traffic to the next highest-visited page. When I check the frequency of keyword use, none of the most-used keywords appear on the home page.
So:
1.)If visitors aren't finding my home page through the use of keywords, how are they finding it?
2.)What are some ways to get visitors to look at the rest of my site, instead of only the home page?
The site is at:
Thanks for your time,
Roy
andy206uk posted this at 15:28 — 30th April 2003.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
i dont think its obvious that the links to articles are actually on your site and not just links to another site... put them in a box with a bold header saying something like "Web Server Times Articles" or something similar.
Try splitting your articles into broader categories... ie:
web design
programing
server management
with descriptions of what people can expect to find in that category.
Maybe a featured article with a description and a few graphics might help as well. Check out sitepoint.com and see how they do it... it might help you out.
Andy
Megan posted this at 15:31 — 30th April 2003.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I think that you should redesign your home page to place a greater emphasis on content. First of all, put ina navbar somewhere. Not having one makes it look like there aren't a lot of places to go.
Also get rid of the introductory text (it's redundant in this case) and replace it with new articles and lead-in text (like many other web dev. sites do - see Sitepoint, Webmonkey etc.) Having a bit of a teaser on the front page will entice people to dive in further and read on. Same goes for the other pages - the lead in text is usually redunant. Nobody is going to read that. Get right to the meat.
You can look at your site logs to find out where people are coming from - some could be coming from forums and other places you've left your mark.
Megan
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The Webmistress posted this at 15:38 — 30th April 2003.
She has: 5,586 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
I totally agree with Megan. Your page just looks like a sign up for a newsletter, especially at 800*600 as you can't see the links and with no navigation that makes it worse.
Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....
rtroxel posted this at 04:44 — 4th May 2003.
He has: 286 posts
Joined: Mar 2003
Hi, everybody!
Many thanks for all your suggestions. I'm going on vacation this week, but when I return, I'll definitely be getting down to work on the site.
Roy
http://www.webservertimes.com
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