Web Page Add Ons

Web page add ons are more than just a guest book or a hit counter which are out dated anyway. So what are the real add ons of today's websites ?

Web page add ons use to be jazzing up your web pages with animation, or adding a hit counter, guest book or sound effect.

For a personal home page these sorts of addons may still be well suited. But for a business or e commerce website they are largely outdated and out moded.

If you operate an e commerce website the simple rule must be if your webpage add ons distract and not attract, don't use them.

This means if webpage addons distract your visitors from your central theme, which could be to sell a message or a product you shouldn't use them.

If however your web page add ons attract your visitors to your central theme, then you should consider using them.

But it must be said that the only way you will know what attracts or distracts is by testing and more testing which usually means split-testing your web pages.

Today's web page add ons are about adding benefits, benefits to the visitor and benefits to the website operator. Let's take a simple example of adding a site map to a website.

A sitemap helps the visitor find what they are looking for more quickly (benefit to the visitor).

It helps the website owner to get web pages indexed by the search engines (benefit to the website owner).

Whilst today's true web page add ons are designed to add real tangible benefits, they can also add more logistic problems of maintenance for the website operator.

Take the sitemap example, every time a new page is added the sitemap needs to be updated.

Doesn't seem like much of a task, but if you multiply it by lots of tasks from other web page add ons, it soon mounts up.

The ideal solution is to find web page add ons with low or no maintenance. In the sitemap example this could be made no maintenance if it's set up to be automated.

Each time a page is added or a change made the sitemap updates automatically.

Adding benefits in the form of automated tasks are the true web page add ons for today's website operators.

Small business website development

Search engine optimization for high search engine ranking