The quality of your Website design effects the number of visitors attracted to your site and whether they take action on the propositions available to them once there. A research study by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools found some interesting results in regard to homepage layout. Here is a quick summary of what they found.
The eyes fixed firstly on the upper left of the page and spend a lot of time at the top of the page, before they then go left to right down the page. The dominant headline will draw the viewer’s eye first upon entering the page. The research also discovered that smaller text has the effect of encouraging the viewer to actually read the words rather than simply scanning over them.
In blurbs, the first one third of text is important, as readers will review this for importance before deciding whether to read on. Viewer don’t read entire headlines either, they scan, spending less than a second on the first couple of words. Top of the page navigation performed the best in terms of being seen and looked at for the longest duration. Amazingly, right side navigation performed as well as left side navigation.
In terms of writing articles keep the paragraphs short and stick to a single column down the page rather than the newspaper formatted multiple columns. If you’re advertising the top left is the money shot, close to editorial content really helps, and text ads were viewed more intently than image based ads. When using images, you can create larger images if you want the viewer to spend longer looking at it.
So next time you are thinking about your website performance, consider styling your homepage layout and then really attract the eye of your visitors.
