What in the world are ‘Little Darlings”?
When you mentally design the web page you would like to use to sell your product or service, do you design it for what you like, for what your prospect likes, or what you think your prospect likes?
I’ll bet it’s the last option. Be very suspicious if that’s true especially if you’ve based your ideas on past experience with media other than websites on the Internet.
Studies have shown some surprising anomalies that could lead you astray in your design and that could also work to your benefit if you understand them better.
Well, that’s cryptic I admit, so let’s take a look at a couple of findings.
Very few people browsing for a product or service will look at information that is below the top two thirds of the first screen they see. Your important points had better be right up there at the top. That doesn’t mean ignore the rest of the page but use it knowing it won’t be read by many people.
How can you use that to advantage? Well if text at the bottom of the page is seldom read, it doesn’t have to be deathless prose does it? In fact if you want to have your web page appeal to search engines by using a lot of text relevant to your search phrases, you can stuff some of them down there even if it makes the reading by humans a little awkward. The top is for your prospects, the bottom is for the search engines.
Contrary what we all ‘know’ is true about newspaper and print ads — i.e. pictures are the first thing a reader notices–there is evidence that on the web your prospect looks first at the print headlines and has become very adept at avoiding pictures unless they are in sync with their interest and in the subject of the text. Eye tracking tests have shown that browsers eyes avoid looking directly at ad pictures especially garish banners that twitch or shake or contort to get them to look. So, use pictures modestly and in a way that will help your prospect associate the message of your ad with you.
Most browsers scan a page starting at the top left, then move to the center, then the left column, then the right. The right column is NOT prime real estate on your page. Moreover, even newbies on the Internet quickly and subliminally catch on to where the good information is (from their standpoint), and if pages are all formatted the same they may skip the content in locations that they discovered was uninteresting previously. If your ‘good stuff’ is in different locations on the page then vary the layout in a way that will make your prospect stop and re-evaluate where to look.
So being suspicious of your ‘little darlings’ really means to think ‘outside the box’. You can pick which cliché you prefer.
