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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.
About the author:
Site">www.sitecritic.net">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.
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