Frequently Asked Questions
Suppose your site is success and you get a lot of appreciations and good comments from the visitors. At this moment, it would be better if you examine the subjects of your site carefully. Read those subjects as a visitor and take note of the questions which emerge in your mind when you go through these subjects.
These are called frequently asked questions (commonly abbreviated as FAQ). These same questions your visitors also may have about your site, the subject or theme, or even about you.
Suppose you go through a subject on model railroading. The natural and simple questions which emerge in your mind are what is it?", "when did it start?", "how much does it cost?", "why does this site exist?" and "who is the webmaster?" etc.
That last question is more important because the visitors want to know the brain behind the web site and it increases its credibility. Later your visitors will (a) return, (b) tell their friends, and (c) purchase something (if your site is commercial). Some web guru's will tell you never to include information about the webmaster but it is not so. In general, people will trust another person more easily than a web site or a machine.
Once you've got your list of questions, go ahead and create one or more web pages (create as many as you like). Add the questions to the pages, along with the answers. If you feel like linking to articles within your site go ahead. It would be better to avoid including external links at this point, because it may distract the concentration of your visitors on your site.
Better to keep your answers short and up to the point. Your goal is to give your visitors on the spot clarification to their natural questions to make them more interested in looking around your site further.
Along with adding questions and answers, you may also come up with additional questions. Add those to your Frequently Asked Questions as well.
Some webmasters like to include a form at the bottom of their questions to allow people to submit additional questions if desired. This is a good option and an easy way to improve your web site's interactivity which is usually beneficial for getting people to return to your site again and again.
It is a good idea to get your visitors involved in answering the questions. Here, the FAQ becomes more or less a moderated message board. Better to receive the visitors' questions in an email, which can be either answered directly or add to the FAQ later.
FAQs are more helpful for answering simple questions before the visitors send you an email. It is important to remember to include a link to the FAQ in a prominent place on every single page of your website. So that the visitors may look at them when they have questions.
In brief, FAQs tend to pull visitors into your site and make them feel better and it inspires them to return again and again.
