Attracting Visitors and Letting Them Talk to You - Week 6

This week's chapters discuss how to both attract and interact with visitors to your website! Attracting visitors is a process that requires a strategic plan in order to succeed over the long run. This process includes:
- Building a great site
- Sharing links with like-minded friends and related websites
- Creating and perfecting meta-tags
- Submitting your site to Internet directories
- Submitting your site to Internet search engines
- Test, reassess to figure out whether the above strategies are enough to generate the amount of traffic you want
This provided some interesting pieces of knowledge, but nothing major that I am going to utilize with my site for this class. I especially learned from the section about meta-tags, and how to use descriptions and keywords to attract users who will benefit from or enjoy accessing your content.

Interacting with visitors can take many forms: email links, form submissions, forums and/or groups. My site has the simplest form of these, the basic email link. I included it on each page as a webmaster contact, as well as on the staff page for each staff member. It is the easiest to code, as well as arguably the most recognizable for browsers. Forms are html coded forms of contact which provide a survey-like response for visitors, providing questions and answers in a limited format which are then submitted to the webmaster by an email. Finally, the most popular type of visitor interaction is forums, which can also be called groups, discussion boards, etc. This provides multiple visitors the opportunity to interact with one another, while the previous two only allow for one way communication with the web designer. Forums are asynchronous communication that provide space for users to post and respond to one another on any topic, in almost any format.