Hot answers tagged user-engagement
6
I remembered seeing a similar question to this on StackOverflow.. dredged it up, and found an interesting lead there called VoxPopuli http://www.eldos.com/vp/ which sounds pretty much like what you're looking for. It's probably not as polished as Uservoice or GetSatisfaction though.
Don't forget to upvote Eugene Mayevski at ...
6
Why not throw a 410 Gone HTTP status header so the search engines know those pages no longer exist. On the page that you display let the user know the product has been discontinued and offer links to existing products that may suit their needs. Also offer obvious links to your home page, site map, and contact page. This will allow them to then navigate to ...
5
I hate this. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Every time I see a website that makes me fxcking register just to get a fxking download I generally leave the site because someone else is going to offer it for less work.
These sites also stink of marketing-collectors so when I see them, I feel that if I DO sign up, I'm going to get spammed to the end of the world ...
5
I'd offer both (I really wish Stack Overflow did). Some people want a more 'professional' or perhaps even site-agnostic gravatar to follow them from place to place, but might want to use a more informal or funny avatar on your web site.
Others might be concerned with Gravatar knowing a little too much about the surfing habits of people that use their ...
5
According to VentureBeats, Uservoice has 3 main competitors still running. They are CrowdSound, GetSatisfaction, and FeedbackFX. Unfortunately, they all use the SaaS model as well so they won't solve you problem.
A quick look on sourceforge and I found that there were 2 project but neither of them have been started.
I looked on codeplex and I found that ...
5
KISSInsights offers a widget that lets you collect feedback from users about the page they're on. They charge $29/month if you need to be able to write your own question. (The default question is, “How did you first hear about us?”, which probably isn't what you want.) I've used this for the exact use case you describe (“Was this page useful?”).
You could ...
4
I would not create fake accounts to make it look as if the site is populated as that can backfire on you in too many ways.
Unless you are very skilled at creating content that looks like it is from different people you may find that your users will be able to spot the fake accounts. Always remember that humans are pattern-seeking mammals and if the ...
4
If you want it to "feel like" one site go with folders (example.com/tech), this will make promoting the site easier (both for SEO and for promoting to people) because you focus all your promotion activities on one simpler domain name.
If you want it to be a network of sites go with completely different domain (example: stackoverflow.com, serverfault.com, ...
4
"If a product page has a good PageRank but, is not sold throughout the year, how to deal with it?"
Prompt visitors to register for product alerts: "Thanks for your interest in [William Wonka's Exploding Chocolate Eggs]. Submit your email address and we'll tell you the moment we have more."
Amazon prompts visitors to check out and purchase the product ...
3
Think about what your users will want to get out of the site, and what you want them to do with it, and make those things big, clear and obvious on the homepage. Make them stand out (in a tasteful way), and use "calls to action" that encourage people to interact with them.
For example:
Sites for software packages should have a 'Download' or 'Buy' link in ...
2
Kevin, I have a renegade suggestion:
Have them fill out a form with the various fields (first, last, email, etc.), but do not validate the input. In other words, allow a bogus email address still to bring them to a download. You could still do something client-side to test whether the email looks valid. Outrageous, right? :-) I can't predict what your ...
2
I think it's ok. Most people leave immediately and they bring the average down.
Just think of your typical behavior when you google for something: you visit a website for a few seconds then realize you are not interested so you go back immediately, and you keep going until you find what you're looking for.
2
There is a good google tech talk about Building web reputation systems
Yahoo patterns has a section on different reputation systems.
2
Yes. No. Maybe.
There are designers who are great at figuring out interaction design and information architecture. There are developers who are great at it. There are specialised information architects who focus on it almost entirely. Often, the best results come when all of them come together to pool their knowledge of the subject.
Give the responsibility ...
2
Disqus does have the option to cache comments locally, and emit them into the parent page. But it's neither easy nor elegant. Their documented solution is to create a database table, and set up a cron job to query their API, using their API client code.
For the Rails crowd: Juvia seems very interesting. It's a self-hosted generic commenting system which ...
2
These guys regularly put out great stuff on conversion rate optimization
http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/learning-zone/
As for tools there are plenty of free or cheap options:
Free - Google analytics, google website optimizer, clicktale (has free and paid options) as well as survey type products kampyle, and 4q for example.
Affordable - ...
2
How about putting the new website up alongside the old website? You could begin with having the old website as the default view, with a link saying 'Try out the new website' at the top, for example. Make it easy for users to provide feedback, so they can tell you about any transition problems they had (you could use something like UserVoice to save hassle).
...
2
The Meta description tag does not affect your rankings so I wouldn't worry about that. But it can affect a user's desire to visit your pages. If you are a good at writing copy and the workload won't be overwhelming, then go ahead and write meta descriptions for each article. If you're not good at writing copy or the workload will be too much, then let the ...
1
It's a very general question, but I would probably set a cookie with a long expiration date when someone visits your site. From there, you can go on to display registration instructions for those that don't have the cookie set. I can't be anymore specific since you didn't mention what technology your site is built on.
1
You can check this link for Facebook FBML Tutorial - Step By Step Instructions to Adding Your FBML Tab Into Your Fan Page
1
YELP did a lot of advertising when they first launched, I would advise following suit and getting a budget together for a large campaign.
Hooking into social networks would be a good way to make it easy for early users to share with their network of friends and colleagues.
Finally, I agree with @itpian.com - % of earnings and gamifying everything with a ...
1
Both
User experience as a whole is affected by both ascetics (the designer) and proper functionality (the developer).
Having just one or the other won't cut it so attempting to define it in one silo won't cut it either.
I see UX designs work best when it is mutually defined and agreed upon by both the designer and developer.
We'll work out the user ...
1
Gravatar makes it easy to include avatars quickly. It's very useful for that. If you want to roll your own, you can always do so down the line. But It's a piece of cake to just include gravatar avatars in your site, and if you are concerned with launching quickly, it's less to think about than rolling your own avatar system. While allowing users to ...
1
Tim,
Be aware that for sites with a large proportion of single-visit sessions (like blogs, where a user reads a single article), the time-on-site value can mislead. Google Analytics fires a single call each page load, and the time-on-page calculation is the difference between the page load timestamp and the subsequent page load. From this it is clear that ...
1
I guess this link will work for you, it has various chat programs for websites and blogs.
http://im.about.com/od/resources/a/imwidgets.htm
http://www.99chats.com/
http://site.bumpin.com/
I have used Bumpin, beacause it provides you good admin control, no spam messages on your e-mail id, you can control your users chat and also you can have same account ...
1
These both have dedicated clients, not jabber (gtalk) clients, but we've had great success with:
Click and Chat (A paid, but cheap, hosted service)
Livezilla (A free, self-hosted service)
The advantage of both of those over Google Talk is that these give you real-time stats about your visits. You can watch, in real time, where your visitors are browsing ...
1
Just announced hosted solution UseResponse should be ideal if you want to host it yourself and customize anything you'd like.
It should release in December 2011, so maybe you'll be interested. I didn't find any other hosted analogs.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
