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Bob and Judy Dunn - Cat's Eye Marketing
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Lessons in Homepage Design:
Looking Through Your Readers' Eyes

eye of a catIf you've ever had a website built, you know how important your home page is. Same thing with your blog's main page. The new Eyetrack III study both confirms what we already know and tells us some new things about what keeps our readers' eyes where we want them to be: on our content.

Eyetracking is research that follows a person's eyes while reading, then analyzes the data for patterns. The Eyetrack III study, just released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools, observed people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. Here is some of what they found:
  1. Content in the upper left attracts readers first. - On the homepage, eyes stopped first at the upper left of the page, spent a little time there, then went left to right across the top. Readers spent much less time on sections further down the page.
  2. Headlines get just a glance. The headline had less than a second of a site visitor's attention and readers looked at just the first few words. If they did not engage them, they moved on.
  3. Text rules over photographs. Photos were not what readers looked at first. And overall, way more time was spent on text than the photographs.
  4. Across-the-top navigation works better than side. Top position navigation bars were seen by the most test subjects and looked at for the longest amount of time.
  5. Smaller type and shorter paragraphs encourage focused viewing. A somewhat surprising find: If you want people to read, not scan, consider using smaller type. Readers spent more time focused on small type than large type. This also applied to headlines.
  6. Ad size and placement matter. When people looked at an ad, it was usually for only 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. Ads in the top left portions of a homepage got the most eye fixations. And not surprisingly, ads placed close to popular content got seen the most.
Go here for more ideas on how your website can be designed-or redesigned-to get more views.
© Marketing Hotspots - Cat's Eye Marketing 2009 - Vol. 2, Issue 18

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