Does Your Website Work Weekends?

One of the great things about your website is that it will go ahead and work for you while you're out doing other things. It will, assuming you've done a good job with it, show the best side of your business to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That is, if you have visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You can tell by looking at your analytics. Here's your dashboard. You can see the traffic to your site in the blue line.



If you put the cursor over the little blue dots, you can see exactly which day, and day of the week each is.

Look at a couple of examples and see the difference:

This site has minor peaks and valleys. Some of the peaks are on Thursdays, some on Tuesdays or Fridays. The traffic never goes way down. This site has traffic all week.




This site has valleys on the weekends. There is an enormous difference between weekday and weekend traffic every single week. Essentially, this site doesn't work on weekends.

What difference does it make? In general, if your site doesn't work on weekends, your customers probably don't either, and they're only visiting when they work.

In that case, your website can be an all-business kind of place. You can use the jargon of your industry. You should be serious enough that your customers' bosses can walk by and see they're working.

You might also be able to increase your traffic, and perhaps your sales, by posting something interesting on weekends, or even offering special offers only on the weekend.

If you have traffic all week, then people come to you whether they're working or not -- or they work weekends, too. You may want more of a Web2.0 feeling, a community aspect, a fun area. You should make sure that your site accommodates amateurs as well as pros at whatever you do. Or, if you're in an industry where people work on the weekends, you might want to take advantage of it by offering those weekend specials if your competitors don't.

It's just another useful piece of information about your clients.