PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

It is an interesting excercise that any webmaster should undertake at least a few times per year. By doing so will show up and interesting result and put the whole business of the website into perspective.

That exercise is to look at your weblog and see how long people stay on your website. Lets face it - people are in a hurry, and unless they see what they want or at least have confirmation that they are on a site that they will be able to find the information they are after, then they will be hitting the back button on their browser faster than than you can say ‘Wait a minute!”

The need to make sure you tell people fast that they are at the right place is further exacerbated by the often poor results being returned by Google. Yes, there is trouble in Paradise and Google is trying to improve the situation since Big Daddy, which is when things started to go belly-up. Poor results means people are having to appraise a site quickly before moving onto the next search result.
What this means is people are being even faster in their initial assessment of if the site they have landed on is right for them. They are becoming skilled in capturing the information before they have to blink again. That is kow long you have to engage with them - less than a blink space.

So what can be done to keep people on your site?

Here are some suggestions to help keep people on your site long enough for them to be drawn into your site and hopefully end up on your order page or contact page.

1. Simple statement at the beginning.
Make sure you have a clear line of text at or near the top of the page that states, in a few words, what the site (or page for internal pages) is about. This line of text can appear under your banner (the most logical place) or can form part of the banner (but of course you lose the keyword benefits then!). This line of text needs to be clear and honest. Don’t say your site is about things its not.

2. Ensure that the banner and graphics are within the genre of your site.
If your site is about dog leashes, a picture of a dog without a leash won’t cut it. The other one I am constantly amused about is web hosting sites that have pictures of computer cases. Lets face it, the person who wants hosting does not care about what the hosting computers look like (and I’d be worried if it looked like a desktop computer, rather than one of hundreds in a rack!). Give the customer an image they can relate to - emotionally - think about it, what is important about web hosting to customers…give them those images.

3. Avoid long blocks of text on the page.
Studies have shown that almost 80& of people SCAN pages. They don’t read word for word. This means your content needs to be formatted using subheads, bullet points and bolding. By breaking it up automatically increases the scanability.

4. Reduce wordage.
Point three overlaps well into point 4, because if you are doing the text formatting correctly, then what you should be doing is modifying your writing style to make your writing more concise (most website could reduce their wordage by 50%). This means a person gets the essence of your site - fast!

5. Be objective.
A site full of boasting claims is doing itself the worst damage it can do in terms of turning people off doing business with them. A survey by Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes in 1997 showed that objective language using neutral and not subjective, boastful or exaggerated language increased the readability by a staggering 27%. Yes the types of words and their emotional responses had an impact on readability (plus trustworthiness).

6. Have clear navigation that is pertinent to the user.
Navigation has two aspects. One is very popular at the moment, the other has gone out of fashion, but still has an important role to play.
First is the main site navigation. There are typicall two places this appears - on the left hand side of the screen, or at the top, just under the banner. Sometime people like to place one on the right hand side instead of the left, but these tend not to be in favour. Another place that a ‘redundant’ navigation is placed is at the bottom of the page. This is called ‘redundant’ because it is the secondary place to look. The bottom of the page was popular a few years ago when pages tended to be longer and the navigation that was near the top of the page was no longer visible. Today pages are shifting towards being much shorter and so the redundant navigation is seen as far less important.
Second is in-text linking. Over at grokdotcom.com they often talk about the active window - that is, the part of the screen where the main content resides. Their suggestion is that where possible people looking at the content shoudl not need to refer to navigation bars/elements at all, but imnportant links should eb contained within the main text. I am a supporter of this approach, and used wisely can enhance the user’s experince while on your site.

Navigation that is pertinent to the user also means adressing the issue of what the users mindset is when looking at your site. For example take water coolers. A user could be looking according to size, but could also equally be better served by having an additional navigational option of home | office | factory etc. Addressing the fact that users can have different mindsets can be a challenging exercise, but can pay big dividends.
7. Draw the eye.
There have been serveral studies recently that have looked at eye paths on a web page. Interestingly neither really supported not disproved the other. But what was evident in both was the importance of the graphical image of the page. This is created using not only pictures, but also the layout of the text. So we see that formatting text appears again. The readers eye in both studies was heavily influenced by what the user was drawn to on the page. One BIG one was a picture of a person. Having a line of text under resulted in that line of text being one of the most read bit of text on the whole page.

Ideally one should be able to create a pathway for the eye to follow - to excite and entice - stay a little longer, find out more, stay more than a few seconds…..

Comments welcome 

Technorati tags web building | site visitor duration | web site readability