Don’t Make Visitors to Your Web Site Think…

Because they won’t!

Before you start planning your web site, take a minute to understand how your average visitor uses the Internet and how they view web sites.

There are basic patterns of behaviour which are totally different from other forms of media and physical shopping (in an actual shop, remember that?). A visitor takes in your page “at a glance”, scanning headings and bullet points and clicking the first thing that catches their eye. This might only be vaguely related to the actual item they are looking for. The majority of the information on your page isn’t read, in most cases barely even looked at. The frustrating thing is, if the page they’ve clicked to hasn’t got the item they are looking for they move on to the next web site and you’ve lost them.

A good example of how visitors scan a page has been detailed in various heatmap eye-tracking studies

F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content