We all want customers to come to our website and enjoy it enough to spend a lot of time on it. However, visitors to most websites find their experiences unsatisfying. Even though there have been great technological advances in the last few years to enrich the web experience, user satisfaction with most sites is still disappointing. Below are the top 10 best practices used by the world’s highest rated websites.

Make the entire site centered around the customer experience

Whether it is selling directly on-line, customer service, information or anything else, make sure your site is providing the experience your customer wants, not what you think they need.

Your website needs a purpose

The goal of a website usually falls into four categories. The first category is to inform or provide useful and authoritative information. The second is to influence or provide information about a product or brand that is sold through distribution or stores, but not directly on the website. An automobile company website is a great example of this. The third category is a site designed to sell your products directly like Amazon. And the fourth is the called a facilitator site or one that adds to a relationship with a customer. Banks, insurance companies all have sites that provide useful information about their customers’ dealings with the company. A website doesn’t have to be just one of these types but can be a combination of these as well.

Update your site based on what your customers want

In other words, frequently solicit user feedback and use it to improve your site.

Make your site personal, deliver relevant and focused information

A user on you site wants information quickly and wants it to be easy to get at and easy to understand. If you have a broad based market, establish areas specific to each user type.

Keep your website content up to date

There is nothing that shows a lack of interest in your own website than information that is out of date, such as an advertisement for an event that happened two years ago.

Don’t forget social networking

Building communities around companies, brands and their customers is no longer new. Keep your website at the center of social networking while utilizing all the available tools like blogs, Facebook, Twitter and others. Your social networking can be unique to certain interests and markets. Once your social network is set up, listen to what your users are saying and use that feedback to keep your “on-line community” moving forward.

Your website should not just connect to your customers, but their peers as well

The purpose of social networking is to have your members share your information with their friends and peers. This is sometimes called a “Digital Referral”. They will do it if your on-line presence has something useful and compelling to offer.

Make your website central to your marketing

How do you market your business? Whatever you do to promote your company or organization should be tied into a dynamic website that attracts and retains users.

Share what they think

Make your customers’ impressions of your website and company or organization visible. This gives a sense of openness and trust to the users of your site.

Above all, your website needs to be fun and rewarding

If visitors to your site have a great experience, they’ll come back and refer their friends.

Adding video, audio, photos and new technologies to a website maybe a good idea, but if the content isn’t engaging, informative and satisfying all the technology in the world won’t keep a visitor on the site. It’s like watching a TV show. If it isn’t interesting or entertaining you are going to change the channel. The same is true with your website. If a visitor isn’t given a reason to stay, there are usually about 1,257,439 other sites that popped up in their search that they will move on to.