Stickiness is certainly desirable, but many sites cannot or will not commit to spending the time and money required over the long term to duplicate what makes the portals, community sites, publishers and entertainment sites so successful.

Many others simply don't lend themselves to that type of engagement.

However, that doesn't mean they can't be sticky. If stickiness is about engagement, then there are reasonable ways for every website to become sticky, because every website engages with their visitors to some degree.

If you're unable or unwilling to implement initiatives like community sites and "push" applications that drive visitors to your site over and over again, you can still improve the way you engage with them.

Consider engagement as another word for "action." What actions do visitors take on a site, and can they be improved?

Take Shoebuy.com, for example.

The company offers such a multitude of products, for such a variety of occasions, that search could be unwieldy. Yet the product, and the site itself, does not lend itself to an application such as Digg's, where the most-often "dugg" story (or in this case, the most often purchased shoe) pops to the top. Shoes are too personal to be purchased that way.

Instead, the site allows users to sort the items in a multitude of ways: by price, occasion, style, brand, men's / women's / kid's / teen, size, sale items, et cetera. That makes shopping both engaging and satisfactory for the user.

The U.K.'s Serenata Flowers is another example of sorting an amazing array of product by offering a wide variety of searches.

Serenata has taken it one step further, however, using AJAX-like elements in the search. When users call up a different sort option, the site pulls the information to the existing page, rather than sending the user to another page. This improves the speed of the search and keeps the visitor from feeling as though he is hopping aimlessly all over the site.