Want More Site Traffic? Add Hot Sauce.

Heat up your website. Check out some of the interactive design strategies nFusion uses to create dynamic, results-oriented websites. We designed the Chili’s Create-A-Pepper site with some of these tricks, and we hope you’ll pick some up.

Enable users to create something on your site. The purpose of Chili’s Create-A-Pepper site is to raise awareness about and solicit donations for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In order to attract visitors and increase engagement we gave users a fun reason not only to read but also interact with messaging: The Create-A-Pepper site encourages visitors to draw on and paint unique images of peppers that remain displayed in the gallery section. This feature increases time-on-site and extends the experience of coloring peppers in Chili’s restaurants into the virtual world.

Give users a reason to share site content. Regardless of your message you can’t expect that your visitors will always latch onto it and tell others. But if your site helps users invent something, experience new Web technology or become otherwise uniquely engaged, users have more of a “fun” reason to spread your message. In the case of the Create-A-Pepper site, visitors get to send other people their artistic creations. And in forwarding these fun, self-created pepper images, users also forward Chili’s call to support the hospital.

Let visitors promote your site via online social networking. Word of mouth spreads fast, but it spreads faster on the Internet. Which is why it’s a good idea to create a site function that allows users to instantly add your site’s message to their MySpace or Facebook pages. For example, the Chili’s Create-A-Pepper site enables a user to "add some pepper to MySpace." Upon clicking the “add” button, a window pops up to present code that the user can copy and paste into MySpace to display the pepper. Every time someone looks at that user’s profile page, he or she will see Chili’s Create-a-Pepper messaging.

Engage users by allowing them to judge or rate content publicly. Soliciting visitor opinions opens up space for dialogue not only between users and site creators but between users themselves. The Chili’s Create-A-Pepper site includes a “Pepper Gallery” in which visitors can “rate” other users’ posted images. This feature also encourages pepper creators to return to the site to see how their peppers rank.

Let visitors opt in to receive messages from the site. Whether your site promotes an event, a good or a service, some users will want to keep abreast of your organization’s activities. Do them a favor and create a function that enables them to sign up to receive updates from you. For example, the Chili’s Create-A-Pepper site lets users opt in to get a reminder about Donate Profits Day, the day on which online contributors to the hospital were totalized and offered to St. Jude.

There are a lot of functionalities that will “add some hot sauce” to your website. Whichever you decide to add, make sure they’ll attract visitors, get them more engaged and enable them to pass along your message to others. Think about your current content and ask yourself what kinds of features make sense for your project. And if you need more tips, just visit the Chili’s Create-A-Pepper site!