The Microsite is an of your website, dedicated to your solution. This is where the user should find involvement and satisfaction.

A Microsite needs certain properties.

Detail:
It should contain enough detail to satisfy the needs and queries of a wide range of users.

Image:
The microsite should also have a slightly different image from the rest of your website. Without contravening your corporate design standards it should appear distinct enough to give your solution a recognisable identity.

Opportunities:
The user needs to find opportunities to

• make an email enquiry
• download free additional information. Or maybe take up a free offer, or promotion or benefit.
• subscribe to your email newsletter. If they want to keep in touch, a newsletter subscription allows this.

All these enquiry or user interaction points need to automatically log the user email address onto a database.

An autoresponder thank you note should also be sent to each enquirer, downloader or new subscriber.

Search Engine Friendliness:
The microsite must be optimised so that an enquirer can easily find your solution when using a search engine, like Google.

Some of your most valuable enquiries will come from users making searches on the web.

You have to put yourself in their frame of mind and think how they might search, looking for your solution without necessarily knowing your company name.

Search frindliness ensures they find you easily.

A Traffic Plan:
Without traffic, your microsite will become a dead letter. The more visitors you have, the more successful your microsite will be.

You will need to plan how you're going to attract traffic to your microsite.

Traffic will come from links from your multimedia, other sites, publicity, advertising, from your own database, and from your existing customers or workforce.

To understand your traffic and know how much of there is, and where it goes, you need traffic analysis reports for your microsite.

Traffic analysis reports will tell you how your visitors are behaving. Are they staying long? Which pages are they looking at the most? The least?

Where are they coming from? Do you get repeat visits, or visits from important customers? How sticky is your site? Do search engines send you many visitors?

These reports will give you accurate feedback that you will need so that you can improve your stickiness as time goes on.

Remember: That which can be measured can be improved.

Regular Reviews:
Quarterly or monthly reviews of your microsite and your multimedia need to be planned-in right at the start.

Expect to develop as time goes by.

After all, your company is developing, your market is developing, so your new media has to develop with it.

Typical topics for review are traffic analysis reports, new developments and newsletter content.

Size:
A suitable size for a microsite will be anything from 20 to 50 pages.

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