Everyone is trying to rank well in search engines so as to
enjoy good amount of free traffic every month. But if you
look at the server statistics carefully, you will notice
that most people leave almost immediately upon entering the
site. You cannot complain about your sales because the fact
is that people in general do not like to stay in any sites
for long.
Remove The Clutter
The basic rule in creating websites nowsadays is to have as
much content as possible so as to please the search engines.
However, cramming too much content in a page without good techniques
can scare your visitors away. This is also the common problem
of most websites today. Research shows that people do not generally
stay in a site for more than 30 secs but my personal experience
tells me that it is 10 secs. The implication to this is that
you only have 10 secs to pitch your idea and persuade them
to stay.
Reveal Some But Do Not Reveal All
An effective website must achieve 2 things within the 10 secs.
A) The user must know what your site is about. B) The user
must be motivated to stay and investigate further.
To achieve A) cannot be done by lengthy stories. People are
lazy and they do not like to read or scroll. So there must
be an obvious sentence, catch phrase or graphic to tell them
what your site is about. Once they are interested in your pitch,
they will start reading the content.
For the content, I would suggest you to write just enough to
arouse interest. If all your stories are told within a page,
then they do not need to navigate your site anymore. This is
similiar to watching movie previews. The preview has to excite
the audience to pay and watch the full movie. If you can achieve
B), you have a chance to make them stay and click on your links.
Guide The Eye To Important Content
People first look at the largest and boldest element on a page
which is usually the logo, top banner or catch phrase as mentioned
earlier. You should next direct the eye to the content. Text
with highlighted headers can stand out prominently. The common
technique to make a header obvious is to highlight the background
of the header using a dark color and write the header text
in white. Many popular portals such as msn and bbc are using
this technique. White background on dark text is most effective
for the main content because it has a very good contrast.
Be Careful About Distractions
Remember the 10 secs rule. You do not want to distract your
visitors within this time frame. Though advertisements are
commonly used for marketing purposes, they are considered as
distractions. Animated gifs is another type of distraction
which can be very annoying. In fact, I do not encourage people
to use animated gifs at all! If you really want animation,
do a good job with flash instead. Unless your site is like
Yahoo or Google, people will not bother to stay long if they
are confused about what you are saying.
Use Images
Playing around with colours and layout in your site is not
enough. You need identifiable graphics such as humans and objects
to make your visitors feel comfortable. Many people are very
scared of using graphics because they are worried about the
downloading time. Valid point but you do not have to use big
images. Images that are about 10 kb in size is a good guide.
To me, making your visitors happier by making them wait a few
milli seconds longer is a good deal. Quality images that describe
your content are very effective. It also makes your site less
boring and create visual stops for your content.
Conclusion
People are impatient and you really have a short time to make
them stay longer in your site. The longer they stay, the higher
the chance that they will buy your idea and use your services.
The first impression is important and we all want it to be
good.
Site Critic is
formed by a group of web addicts, mainly volunteers from
all over the world. Our goal is to create a community of
web designers and developers who share the common interest
in bringing out the best in creatiing effective web sites.
