europeforvisitors - 3:35 pm on Sep 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

The only hard productivity rule I'd suggest is that there should be at least one new and exclusive article or news item on your site every single day, so that your visitors can build your site into their daily routine.

Not all sites lend themselves to a user's daily routine. On a destination travel-planning site, for example, the vast majority of visitors will be people who are planning trips to that destination. When their vacations are done, they're unlikely to come back until they're planning new trips to the destination(s) that you cover. Similarly, a site with information on major appliances or emergency plumbing repairs will get visits only when people are thinking of buying something like a refrigerator or have leaky toilets.

Still, even on a site that readers visit only occasionally, productivity can be useful for other reasons (such as creating more opportunities for internal traffic and "long-tail" search-engine referrals).