Great site designers do everything they can to make their sites engaging and prevent traffic doing a U-turn. Here are five ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Capture Attention with a Visual Site Map

Most web sites usually start simple but get pretty complex before long. They are a maze of pages, sections and links that leave users looking at the site map in order to find what they’re looking for. You can make their job a lot easier with a visual site map.

A visual site map is a pictorial representation of a web site and when you click on a part of that picture, a small display pops up describing what is in this section of the web site. For example, a home furniture web site may have a site map showing the various parts of a home, and clicking the living room would pop up a description of living room furniture section.

Visual site maps are vivid, memorable and easy to use compared to traditional site maps.

2. Enhance Engagement with Related Actions Suggestions

If you know the way people use your site, you probably know where they will go next. For example, someone that looks up pricing will likely go to the buy page. In other words, you can anticipate related actions from a given point. Use this knowledge of user intention and make it easy for the user to find the related pages quickly.

A Related Action Suggestion is an interactive element on your web page which suggests pathways to related pages. This can include a video, image or text with audio that optionally educates a user, helping him or her find parts of a site he or she may not be aware of.

3. Create Curiosity Using Page Peel Banners

You can often organise a message in two or maybe three layers. The first is something you would like to say to everybody that visits your web page. The second is something you would like to say to those who are interested. The third is to those who are really interested.

Peel-away banners work great in these situations. A well-designed peel-away banner can have attractive images, messages and even music that plays when the banner loads or when the user peels away the top banner to reveal what’s underneath. It is customary for the top right corner of the banner to appear in animation which suggests that you can drag it and peel it away. That's the teaser.

4. Build Credibility with a Quotes Flicker

In the age of instant credibility, you must verify the message on your website with customer testimonials, recommendations, reviews and other types of quotes. For best results, a quote should be short, story-like, easy to read, and preferably accompanied by a picture of the person providing the quote.

A single quote creates a lot of authenticity. If you have several customer quotes, even better. A good way to render multiple quotes is to make a playlist of sorts and render the quotes one by one. Depending on the section of your website, or seasonal merchandising focus, you may choose a different set of quotes. This not only adds variety to the site, but also focuses the right message to the right audience.

5. Build a Sense of Urgency and Drive Action

A web site is about driving user action. People will act if there is a sense of urgency: a deal that is only until the end of the month, a deadline for enrolling in an event, a special that lasts for only 24 hours and so forth. Highlight the urgency with a countdown timer that shows the days remaining and drive action by popping up additional media. The media could be a video, an image or text with audio, designed to issue a call to action.