Thursday, May 7, 2009

Psychology of Your Website

On your website, people tend to actually read very little of your content. Instead, they skim, jumping from point to point in an “F” pattern.

Visitors to your site tend to look at the first headline and typically read all of it (if it’s not too long). Then, they drop down to the next big, bolded line and read some of it. Finally, they skim down the left side of the page looking for something else to grab their eye’s attention.

There are only a few of these studies, and they all come to the same conclusions:

· visitors read very few words
· those words are located in an “F” pattern

The wisdom and advice for you is this:

If you want to capture your visitor’s attention, you have to reformat and edit your web content to take advantage of how people read websites. You have to take advantage of the psychology, or you will be victimized by it.

-- Michael Lovas