When beautyQ.com debuted in February 1999, the site hoped to draw an audience of teen girls seeking health and style advice. Content, thought cofounders Ann Fowler and Angelique Finan, would be the big draw.

They weren't wrong: The site enjoyed brisk traffic, but even a site deep in content and rich in design sometimes isn't enough these days.

"Two months after our launch, we decided to implement a bulletin board," says Fowler. Rather than choosing to host the bulletin board on the company's own servers, Finan signed up for Multicity.com's service, integrating the discussion areas into the site with only a few lines of code.

"It built an instantaneous community for us," says Fowler. It also increased time spent on the site. "Now, the average time a visitor spends on our site is over 10 minutes." Not bad, considering that the average home user spends 30 minutes per browsing session, and that time is divided among an average of 10 sites in a given month, according to a recent Nielsen/NetRatings report.

As beautyQ learned, getting people to stay at your site and come back for more takes more than just content and an attractive interface. The aim here is stickiness. Roughly defined, stickiness is the ability of a site to make visitors stay when they're there and come back when they're not…

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