Lesson 4: Three Reasons People Visit

As your team discusses what your club's website goals should be and what content to include, ask yourself ... why will people visit and navigate through our site?

Visitors are usually drawn to a website for the following reasons:

• They find it during a search - They use a link found during on a search with a popular web search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing.  That means that you have to get listed on one of the top two or three pages of a typical search.
• They are referred to it - Visitors use a link provided by a friend during an email or chat session, or a link found on another website.
• They get it from other media - They use a link that was included in print ... a club brochure, a newspaper article, a flyer, a fundraising ticket, etc.

3 Reasons Visitors Stay Past the First 10 Seconds


Getting someone to visit your club website is one thing ... getting to stay and return is the other major goal.  Once a person reaches a website, what are they three reasons that they stay and return:

• They find something interesting and usually different ... that means that if you want the visitor to become a regular user of the site, you need to provide regularly changing content.  A news based blog with regular human interest stories and informative how-to articles will keep people returning.
• They find an authoritative source of information ... the content you provide can be relied on to be relevant, accurate and concise.
• They find a valuable online resource for something they need to do ... this can include downloadable files, forms, links to other online resources and websites, brochures, and how-to articles and step-by-step guides.

The key is
   
    ... make it interesting
                       
            ... make it relevant and useful

                    ... make it memorable.