37 Must-Have Strategies to Better Engage Website Visitors, Part 2

You don't want to clutter the website with too much information, she added. Focus on the three to five key goals and priorities you want people to do on the homepage. More than that and the homepage is out of control, making it difficult for visitors to focus on any one thing, Kapin said.

13. Don't make pages too long
Defenders of Wildlife used to have pages that looked more like pages in a novel than pages on a website. So it audited its content and broke down the pages into smaller, more user-friendly ones, down into five or six subpages. What the organization found was that page views declined, but the time people spend on the site increased, which is what Defenders of Wildlife wanted.

Ask yourself who your audience is and if your page is appropriate for what you want to accomplish, Manix said.

Kapin added that when she was working on a redesign for an organization, it wanted to cram every piece of information it had on one page. So the two parties kept going and back forth without much progress. Finally, Kapin printed out the wireframes for the entire page the way the organization wanted it to show that it was actually larger than Kapin herself, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall. Sometimes people need to see a real visual of how long their website truly is.

14. Include a clear call to action on every page
Reed again used the example of DoSomething.org, which always displays very clear calls to actions on its site, such as "Subscribe to your Newsletter" and "Become a Member."

15. Reduce the use of Flash
"Apple hates Flash," Kapin said. "It's one of the big reasons we don't use Flash anymore — it's not supported on the iPhone or iPad. As more and more people are adopting mobile, which is huge — used more than desktops now — it's really important that the site is mobile-friendly."