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As any webmaster knows, he is in a never-ending quest to increase the amount and quality of visitors to his / her site, or drive the sales up if it's an e-commerce site. Traditionally this is achieved by modifying the content shown on page and its placement. Let's face it. Each web page has a very finite amount of space, so we can't clog it with information without slowing down the site or making it look ugly. Even more if it's content not relevant to returning visitors. How do we work around this?
The idea was thrown by Seth Godin in his article “...in the middle, Starting”. We can show content to new visitors, identifying them as such based on a cookie stored in their browsers. I took the idea further, added some visual effects and made it into a Joomla! module called “Visitor 2 Buyer” or V2B. This article outlines some of the possibilities of V2B, but doesn't cover all of its functionality. V2B comes with detailed documentation which will help you create the right effect for your own site.
Getting quality visitors with RSS subscriptions
In the first example, I am going to simply add a notification to the home page for new visitors to add our site's RSS feed to their browsers. By default, most Joomla! templates display the RSS feed icon on the bottom of the page. This isn't very good, as it can be easily missed. Then again, you don't want to take up space above your article listing as your returning visitors will find it annoying and confusing. With V2B we can display this icon above our content only to new visitors.
First off, I have to tell you that I'm going to use my beloved “faux module inclusion” technique, as illustrated in my blog post on hiding Joomla! modules from registered users. The reason I want to do that is that Joomla! offers a neat RSS icon module, mod_syndicate. It displays the RSS icon for the current page's RSS feed. Of course, you might be using a different module, or an entirely different service (FeedBurner, anyone?) but the concept is still the same.
I made the “Welcome to my site!” into a Heading 3 – that is the default heading level used by modules – and added an extra horizontal rule below the rest of the text. Here is what it looks like :
That's a subtle effect which can increase the amount of people subscribing to your RSS feeds. Since these are the ones who really care about your content, they'll come back often. That's a huge traffic boost to your site, both in volume and quality of visitors.
Drive sales up by rewarding newcomers
One of the tricks employed by many commercial companies is running a limited-time offer to attract new customers. Take the cellphone network operators for example. They promise a “special deal” for new clients so that they can attract them, then up-sell them to make some real profit. V2B allows you to do that on your e-commerce site, too.
Here is our action plan: we want visitors who are not signed in (therefore probably had never done business with us before) to be displayed a subtle but prominent message that a 10% discount offer is underway for new clients, giving them a coupon code. To make it more prominent, this message will appear “sticky” on the bottom of the page, like in the picture below:
Drawing attention to important changes
Sometimes you make important changes to your site's features. Drawing attention to them is a difficult call. You don't want to post something in your front page as it doesn't look professional, but you don't want to “burry” the notice somewhere where it won't be seen. Big corporate websites deal with the same problem by popping a modal dialog box upon your first visit, drawing your attention effectively as the box won't allow you to use your site unless you dismiss it. With V2B you can duplicate the same effect.
Our scenario goes like this: You added a new e-shop to your site. You need your registered users to be aware of this, showing the message neither to guests nor to administrative staff of your site. The message should only be shown once, either when someone logs in to your site or comes back to it for the first time after you have added this feature. Since a modal dialog can be confusing, you need it to automatically dismiss itself after 10 seconds.
And I then I added my custom message, achieving this effect upon visiting my site's frontpage:
V2B goes live on 30th September. It will be retailed through iJoobi.com
About the author
V2B is developed by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos. He is a 29 years old Mechanical Engineer turned web developer. Into Mambo and then Joomla! development since 2003, he is mostly known as the lead developer of JoomlaPack, the now-famous backup solution for Joomla! powered web sites.
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