When you website reaches its first primary plateau where your visits start to stagnate, that is not necessarily the time to panic and redesign your site. Its a time to add "more-better-different".

Giving them a reason to come back

Websites are so diverse in their purposes and nature, that there are few all encompassing one-size-fits-all methods you can use to increase your repeat business. However, there are some time honored widgets you can add to your site to raise its profile and get you beyond your initial build.

Newsletters

Yep, the good old newsletter can bring out the repeat customer on a regular basis. Doesn't have to be a huge tomb of information, but it should be interesting, low on promo spam, and high on content. If you can get people to sign up for a news letter you can build a profitable site out of any subject. How many newsletters are you signed up for?

BBS Forums and Messaging Systems

In order to make a good old BBS forum system work, you need to have a certain level of traffic to work with, and you need to seed the message base with five or more good starter messages. The whole deal with BBS's systems is getting users to interact with each other. As it stands now, this is a solo sight out in the middle of the desert as far as your concerned, but if you were reading this in the context where you could easily reply or read other opinions, wouldn't you be more likely to come back to see the responses in a few days?

Polls and Voting

With controversy reining supreme these days, who doesn't love to put in their two cents on a quick poll? Users come back time and time again to see the results.

Site Interactivity

Site Interactivity is the word for the day. No matter how good your content is, how compelling your arguments are, there is nothing like putting two people together on the Internet. Look at the popularity of email and Usenet. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. If you can engage your users senses beyond the solidarity of setting behind the keyboard and reading, you'll get them to come back and back.

Chat

Its almost official, chat doesn't work very well from most small and medium websites. Unless you have over 5000 users a day, don't consider building a chat system as a good use of your time.

Chats main drawback is that it requires quite a few people to make a system work, and most websites don't have that kind of traffic or support in order to make chat successful - nobody wants to set in a lonely chat room.

On-the-other-hand, I am amazed at the number of people that will message me via ICQ. I recently put my ICQ number at the bottom of several pages. So many users messaged me, that I couldn't get any work done and had to take it off. While chatting with these people, I traced their path through the logs and most hit more than 20pages on this site over an average of an hours time (yikes - kinda cool eh?).

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