Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
TIP
I made a brief mention earlier in this chapter about the often short
life span of microsites, and while it would be nice to leave them up for
an extended period of time, it doesn
'
talwaysworkoutthatway.This
means at some point, there
s going to be a virtual hole where the micro-
site used to live on the Internet. If users have visited the site before and
found it to be useful, they may try to come back only to find it has gone
missing. Rather than leaving them wondering what happened, it
'
'
s a good
idea to redirect them to your client
'
s main Web site. To leave even less
room for confusion, it
'
s a better idea to redirect them right to the
product
s specific page. For example, if you were to visit a microsite for a
certain model car and that microsite no longer existed, the best scenario
would take you to the page about that car within the auto manufacturer
'
'
s
main Web site.
Highlight and Promote
The push users need can come in several different forms and the
one that
s best is dependent on the Web site and even the brand
itself.OneapproachwouldbethattheWebsitehasasectionon
the home page that is reserved for featured products or services.
This may be an area where a client typically advertises a sale or
other upcoming event. If your client has taken the time and spent
the money to have a microsite built for a particular product,
chances are pretty high that they won
'
t have any problem at all
using that promotional area to advertise and drive traffic to that
microsite. There may be other areas within the main site that can
be utilized for making visitors aware of the new microsite, but the
goal is the same throughout: Highlight and promote the new pro-
duct or service for which the microsite was built.
'
Send Them Back
Where the main site is a great source of traffic for the microsite,
the same can be said in reverse. There are some clients who are
naturally very good about keeping users flowing in both direc-
tions and then there are those who you
'
ll need to explain this to.
Although a microsite is focused on a particular product or service
that your client has to offer, it
'
s smart to try to influence users to
also visit the client
s main Web site to find more. Once they visit
the main Web site, they may find products or services that your
client has to offer that they were previously unaware of. And who
knows, they may even be interested in buying those other items.
Another advantage to driving users to both sites from within both
sites is link popularity. For every link and every click from one
site to the other, the destination site
'
'
s link popularity grows,
