web design
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web design | Graphic Web Design |
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Registration & RedirectsWell, if you're the only game in town, and you've got the corner on the market, you don't need this page. So skip it. Ah, but you stay. What if I made you register before reading this column? How keen would you be to finish it? What if, when you hit the back button to leave, you only popped right back here? Would that make you want to stick around? Here are two ways to make users more determined to leave your site than just about anything else. Make users register. You want their information, you want to advertise to them, you want to get their name, address, and phone the second they come inside the store. But frankly, most users won't put up with it. Before they came to your site, they got 35,000 listings returned on their search for "used purple chungamonkeys". If filling out a form is required to see your site's precious chungamonkey inventory, they'll just hit the back button and try a different site. Let's imagine it a different way. You're walking through the mall, and outside every store is a salesperson standing guard. Before you can enter to shop at any store, you have to give this salesperson your name and address. Boy, that would suck. Getting users to fill out a form should be the very last step in making a purchase. By the time the user has made the decision to buy something, he's prepared himself to give out information. Using redirects. Okay, you don't find what you want, so you hit the back button -- CLICK! You're still at the same site. You hit back again. CLICK! Still here... You now check the name of the site to make sure you really are coming back to the same place -- Al's Discount Chungamonkeys, yep -- and you curse Al under your breath. Redirects are commonly used when you've got a secondary domain name that points to your main site. They can be set to redirect immediately, or after a certain interval. If you're going to use the redirect, GIVE AN INTERVAL! Say something like "You will be redirected automatically in X seconds..." so that when users hit the back button, they see the screen that pushed them onto your site. And they know to hit back a second time. |