6 Top Tips to make even the simplest of websites dynamic
Keeping your website dynamic, keeps them coming back for more. It’s not rocket science, but in a time-pressured environment with limited resources, investing in keeping your website dynamic may not be your number one priority. It needn’t prove that painful however. Here’s six ways that you can improve your website dynamics with the minimum of fuss, time and investment: 1 Use social media widgets This is the simplest and easiest way of making your website ‘update’ on a regular basis. Widgets for Facebook, Twitter, et al are free and easy to embed in your HTML. If you can’t afford the time to create dynamic content directly for your site, then dual-using the content you are putting out on social media is the fastest and most efficient way of creating a dynamic website. 2 Take advantage of RSS feeds RSS actually stands for Rich Site Summary (also known as Really Simple Syndication) and was designed to pull summaries of dynamic content from elsewhere into other sites. If you already have a blog for your site, then you can link that RSS feed. Similarly if you have a YouTube or iTunes feed, using the RSS feed is a great way to cross-promote these. If you don’t have your own content on an RSS feed don’t worry. There are plenty of news sites and the like who offers embedding of their RSS feed, or RSS widget onto your site. Many sites use this to provide up-to-date news headlines to their own visitors and it can work as a way of keeping visitors on your site. 3 Add some Video Sticky content is important. The kind of stuff that keeps people on your site and keeps them coming back. Video is becoming ever more important on the internet and is a great way to keep visitors updated and entertained. Whether that is product promotional videos, interviews with key people or footage of recent events you have attended, all will have an ‘interest’ value for key parts of your audience. As mentioned above, if you host your videos on YouTube, you can get a dual-use of those videos by embedding them on your main site or using the RSS feed for your YouTube channel. 4 Use Images As the song goes, “a picture paints a thousand words” particularly online, when people rarely have the time or inclination to read pages of text. An interesting image, perhaps taking from an unusual angle, can become a big talking point for your brand 5 Polls and contests Interaction and engagement grabs attention. It’s why social media works so well. By running a poll “What is your favourite product…” you are inviting visitors the chance to play a part in your page. If they grasp the nettle and take part there is a good chance they will make a mental note to come back and see what the final vote result was too. Offer a contest (maybe giving away a free product) does the same. Both create new, changing content to your site. Depending on your site and business you may want to update these every month or every week. 6 Use related links The most successful of e-commerce operations have built on that success in recent years by recommending other products customers have added to their shopping basket when making similar selections. This is dynamic web systems at their user-experience best. Most e-commerce software offers this functionality so make sure you have it switched on if you have an online shop. If your site is built using WordPress, Joomla, etc there are many widgets that offer a similar function, recommending other articles that may be of interest to your visitors. Don’t overdo it though. Dynamic sites are not as search engine friendly as a static site, especially if the dynamism is based on pulling content from elsewhere. In addition, too many scripts and widgets increase page load which also has a negative SEO impact, so be aware. The importance is to make your site dynamic enough to make visitors want to keep coming back. Remember overdoing the bells and whistles will also detract from your design and of number one importance is your user’s experience.
Time to post – What Bit.ly says
We’ve written before about the best time to post on social media for the biggest engagement but URL shortener experts Bit.ly recently revealed their own findings which are also well worth studying. The report is based on Eastern Standard Time, so skews any UK data but the premise of what time in day works best, looks a familiar pattern however, that certainly those just starting out would do well to follow. It seems the lunchtime, post lunchtime slot is the best time to catch the Twitter traffic with the highest click count occurring between 1 and 3pm Monday through to Thursday). So not the full week. Friday it appears is a bit of a lacuna. In fact the weekend starts early as according to bit.ly if you are looking to use Twitter as a way to drive traffic to your content you are wasting your time posting after 3pm Friday until Monday morning. Facebook is similar but with a bigger window of 1pm to 4pm in the afternoon Monday to Thursday. If you want peak action then Wednesday 3pm for a Facebook post is the ultimate for traffic click through – who’d have thought it? It’s pretty scientific from Bit.ly – did you know your post has a half-life – but not so it is difficult to understand. The most interesting revelation from the report is the impact of Tumblr on the world of social networking. Many are looking at it as an option to perhaps bridge the differences between Twitter and Facebook, but as a business tool it is certainly still in its infancy, yet it does appear to interact much differently from it’s two bigger siblings. According to bit.ly. Tumblr traffic hits its peaks between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday. There are similar traffic spikes on Sunday when other click through rates are tiny. Amazingly, against almost every result shown by Twitter and Facebook, Friday evening appears to be the optimal time to post on Tumblr, perhaps reflecting the younger demographic and types of posts (ie social events) make good posts on Tumblr. Of course, as we have said before, each and every sector and each and every business is unique. What you actually want to be doing is tweeting and posting when your own followers are most likely to be watching, or better still when your would-be followers are most likely to be watching as you also want to be increasing your follow too. When have you found works best for your business?