Newsletters

Some people feel they have to keep up with a periodical newsletter in order to collect emails and names from visitors. Not true but having access to a database of users in case you ever do want to send out a newsletter is valuable. Newsletters do not have to be monthly but can be quarterly or even at random. There are ways to set up an automatic publication or a weekly auto email of your site's articles. The point is: if you do not present some way to collect visitor data then you are allowing a certain percent of potential return visitors to slip away never to visit your site again.

Alert of New Comments

Wordpress and Joomla both have add ons that allow a commenter the option of receiving replies via email. I cannot tell you how many times I made a comment on an article or blog post and forget to check the follow ups. I imagine the same goes for a lot of other commenters.

Social Profiles

With social networking all the rage, people want to connect with you outside of your site. Setting up a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc page adds the option of connecting with you on a more "personal" level. Don't have the time to keep up with these social pages? Most social sites have APIs that you can automatically post to via most web scripting languages. Su.pr has a scheduled post feature for Twitter and Facebook.

Social Sharing

Providing the means to automatically add an article or element of your site to most social networks saves several extra steps versus the visitor copying the link, shortening the url and finally sharing your article.

Search Box

This should be obvious but I cannot count how many times I have came across obscure search box locations or the omission of search itself.

Categorizing

Many blogs and content platforms have the ability to categorize posts and even if you do so on the backend, you may skip providing these categories on the front end. Organizing your site into categories & sub-categories allows the visitor to easily find other articles that interest them.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are like categorizing but tell where the visitor is at related to the home page. It lets them know the hierarchical structure of the site and how to find similar or related posts and articles to the one they are reading.

Suggestions and/or Contact Form

The best critics on site usability, functionality, flow, etc come from visitors themselves. Provide a way of contact and they will take the time to tell you how you can improve your website.

Language Add On

I noticed people were using Google Translate (not perfect, I know) to convert several of my blogs into their language. Thankfully both WordPress and Joomla have a tool that makes this much easier for the visitor and increased traffic by 10-15%.