Let your visitors' eyes make your site more effective
Understanding the way visitors view your website can help you make more sales
Ever wonder how your visitors see your site? Studies by the Poyner-Stanford Project show how people perceive what they see on web pages. And their findings give valuable pointers on how to design a site so it fits the way that visitors instinctively interact with it.
Understanding how visitors see your site is the first step toward gearing it for them. Give them what they're looking for and you're a lot closer to having them as a customer. Disorient them, confuse them, leave them unsatisfied and they'll bounce right out of your site and go elsewhere.
There are essentially two areas of your page that are crucial to winning your visitors' trust and three others that are useful once you've earned it.
Top of the page - your site at a glance
The first thing visitors see is the top of your page. They process what they see in the first split second to determine, 'Where am I?' 'Will this page answer my questions?' 'Is it worth checking further on this page?' This makes the top of your page critical for communicating what you're about and how you can help them.
How to hook your visitors on first glance
Do the tops of your pages do that now? Decide what your site can do for your visitors and boil it down to a single phrase. Tweak it, test it, and refine it until it communicates what will benefit your visitors there. Make sure it speaks their language (the language of visitors rather than the language of sellers or of webmasters). And that it reassures them that your site and their needs are a good match.
Your logo
You should have a logo or some similar graphic in that site-at-a-glance position. Having a simple, but effective logo or identifying graphic in this site-at-a-glance position reassures them that you're an established business.
Visitors unconsciously associate the lack of some graphic element with a beginner who hasn't fully gotten their business going. There goes your credibility right there.
(Note: if you need a logo, I recommend that you check out the following site:
http://www.jonbaas.com/art_solutions.html
He's consistently done excellent work for me!)
Does your logo help you or hurt you?
Does it provide the orientation and reassurance your visitor needs that your site can answer their needs? If not, consider how to either change your logo or work in the necessary orientation and reassurance around it.
Make sure your logo loads quickly, too. Many designs place showy, browser-choking graphics at the top of the page that virtually assure that visitors will look at a blank page while the browser struggles to load it.
Graphics done with communication in mind rather than as an exercise in self-expression can be very effective at quickly helping a visitor grasp connections that might take many words. But it won't communicate anything until it loads.
Getting around an inefficient logo
If you use cascading style sheets nowhere else on your site, use them to give your visitors something that pops up immediately while your top graphic loads. With a simple line of code, you can provide a line of text that can orient and reassure your visitor, and then magically disappear as soon as your graphic is fully loaded.
Using top navigation bar links
Do you place a ribbon of links at the top of your page, either just above the logo or as a divider between the top of the page and the body? If you do, make sure it benefits your visitors' first glance.
Use such a ribbon only for the links that will most effectively communicate the benefits of your site. Leave less appealing links, such as About Us, Company History, and FAQs, for less valuable real estate, if you use them at all. Save top links for keywords that communicate that you have exactly what your visitors came to your site to find.
Overall, make sure everything at the top of your page informs and reassures your visitors that digging further into your site will help them meet their needs.
Avoid telling them this outright, though. You won't convince them by saying, 'You'll find everything you're looking for right here!' You want to provide them with clues that lead them to make that conclusion on their own.
The center of interest - the center of your page
Studies show that after processing the top of your page and deciding that they have found a site that might help them, their eyes move squarely down the center of the page. Newcomers and savvy surfers alike focus on the same place - the center.
This is where your meat needs to be. This is where you make your case. But here, too, a study of eye motion yields important tips.
Write your information to be scanned and easily skimmed
Visitors on web pages are in much more of a rush than readers of printed matter. Large, solid blocks of type drive visitors away.
Break your information into short paragraphs that give the impression of quick, easy reading. Split it up further with frequent, descriptive headings so they can quickly see exactly what is covered and pick out exactly what they find most relevant to them.
And make use of bulleted or numbered lists rather than paragraphs when you want to communicate multiple, short bits of information. A list of short items is much quicker to process and much more inviting to scan than the same information stuffed into one, long sentence.
Use colors and fonts that are easy on the eye
Do you have your heart set on doing your site with neon yellow text on neon green background? Have fun expressing your inner artist - but prepare for visitors to bounce right out of your site.
Study after study has shown that the color combination that sells best is black text on white background. Nothing else even comes close. Black on white is clear, it's comfortable, it's familiar and because of all these things, it invites people to read what's written.
Studies have also shown that sans-serif fonts (without any 'feet' at their ends) work much better for the rush-rush type of reading that people do on the Web than do the serif fonts (with the little 'feet' on them) that are standard in books and newspapers.
Serif fonts are easier on the eye for reading long documents because they lead your eye from one letter to the next. Sans-serif fonts work better for skimming and scanning, where the reader jumps around to pull out items of interest quickly.
Consider fonts like Verdana, Arial, and Helvetica, in that order, for your safest bets for the main body of your page. Use popular serif fonts like Times New Roman for lengthy documents like affiliate agreements or white papers that require more careful reading.
Focus everything you write on your visitors
Make your focus on your customers' clear throughout. Your page exists to serve your visitor's needs, not to let you ramble about your business or your product. Apply this key question to every sentence on your site: 'Do they need to know this to satisfy their need?' And if a sentence doesn't pass the test, either rewrite so it does, or kill it.
Effectively using the rest of your page - remaining areas
Although your visitors' attention focuses on the center of the page, that doesn't mean the rest has no value. Use every centimeter of online real estate as effectively as possible.
The left side
Web visitors have grown used to finding a navigation bar and will look to their left when they need to find related links. Again, the principle of easy scanning comes into play here.
Keep your navigation bar clean and well organized into easily scan able blocks. Keep it simple, keep it neat, and make sure that everything that your visitor will find important at this point in their visit is at their fingertips.
The right side
No web convention exists that leads visitors to look to the right on your page, but you can rely on the scrollbar to do that for you. Their eyes will pass over the right side of your page as they use the scrollbar, picking up glimpses of what you put there.
Think of it as a supplemental area to store info that will mean more to visitors once they're engaged in your persuasion. Give them newsletter signups, testimonials, guarantees, refer-a-friend scripts, buttons to let them speak with live help, affiliate signups - anything that will help them move forward toward their goals and yours.
The bottom
Think of this as another supplemental area, although one designed more to provide additional resources than to guide visitors in their decision process. Contact information, links to your site map, alternate navigation links, links to other related sites, frequently asked questions, and anything else that a truly engaged visitor might want to find.
These will vary depending on your site and its goals. One, however, is essential: full and complete contact information.
One of the most important parts of building a relationship that makes your visitors feel comfortable buying from you is to let them know that they can reach you in any way they choose - e-mail, phone, fax, or snail mail. Never let a page pass on which you leave them able to question whether your business is there for them.
Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.
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