Eye tracking study reveals 12 website tactics

Eye tracking studies have revealed valuable information about how people read and interact with websites.

In no particular order, here are 12 results I found particularly interesting.

1. Headlines draw eyes before pictures.

2. People scan the first couple words of a headline.

3. People scan the left side of a list of headlines.

4. Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second.

5. Smaller type promotes closer reading.

6. Navigation at the top of the page works best.

7. Short paragraphs encourage reading.

8. Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership.

9. Ad placement in the top and left positions works best.

10. People notice ads placed close to popular content.

11. People read text ads more than graphic ads.

12. Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual informatio

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80% of journalists say companies without a website are less credible.

Arketi Group, a high-tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, released its 2009 Arketi Web Watch Survey. The survey reveals 68 percent of journalists consider the impact of social media on BtoB reporting to be positive.

A free copy of the findings is available at www.arketi.com/surveys.

“While high-profile social media tools like blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are of interest to journalists, our findings indicate BtoB marketers should not discount tried-and-true Internet technology,” said Mike Neumeier, principal of Arketi. “Search engine optimization and building media-friendly websites site remain vital to reaching the business media.”

When asked how journalists use the Internet:

   --  95 percent say search
   --  92 percent say reading news
   --  92 percent say emailing
   --  89 percent say finding story ideas
   --  87 percent say finding news sources
   --  75 percent say reading blogs
   --  64 percent say watching webinars
   --  61 percent say watching YouTube
   --  59 percent say social networks

88% of journalists say they spend 20 or more hours a week on the Internet

85% have a LinkedIn account

55% are on Facebook

24 % tweet on Twitter.

92% of journalists say they get story ideas from news releases

85% turn to industry sources, and an equal number tap PR contacts.

12% have used Twitter to find a source or story idea.

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10 Words to Use in Your Website Copywriting

Copywriting. It’s the backbone of your website. If you don’t use the right words, you’ll never convert your visitors into paying customers. So, stop focusing on those keywords for a minute, and start focusing on using these 10 results-driven copywriting words.

1. You–This is the most important word in your website copywriting.

2. Free–People love feeling like they’re getting something for nothing. More importantly, people online are wary of losing something to a scam.

3. Guaranteed–Again, online shoppers are more cautious than traditional shoppers.

4. Easy– People love easy.

5. New–New has always been an effective buzzword.

6. Proven–Of course, new means nothing if it isn’t proven.

7. Results– Your potential customers want to know what results they can expect with your product.

8. Save– It’s not always about saving money, especially if you’re marketing yourself as a top-shelf brand.

9. Maximize– Back it up with facts that show how your reader will “maximize” the benefit.

10. Benefit–Tell your readers how they will benefit from using your product.

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Setting Goals for Your Business Website

This is the question you should be asking yourself every day:

How effective is your website at achieving the goals you have for your business?

If you do not know the answer, it may be because you have not set your goals properly. Do you know what the purpose of your site is? What are the benefits for you and your business?
Lets take a look at these questions, and potential answers.

• Your website should position you as an expert in your field.
• Your website is a starting-point for the identity of your brand.
• Your website expands your marketspace beyond yesterday’s geographical boundaries.
• Your website is a tool for expanding your list of potential clients.
• Your website is a venue for providing value to your market before you ever make a sale.

Does your website do these things? If not, do you need help putting them in place

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15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

1. Favicon - A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser.

2. Titles And Meta Data - Your page title is the most important element for SEO and is also important so that users know what’s on the page. Make sure it changes on every page and relates to that page’s content.

3. Cross-Browser Checks - It’s important that your website works across browsers.

4. Proofread - Read everything. Even if you’ve already read it, read it again.

5. Links - Don’t just assume all your links work. Click on them.

6. Functionality Check - Test everything thoroughly.

7. Graceful Degradation - Your website should work with JavaScript turned off.

8. Validation - You should aim for a 100% valid website.

9. RSS Link - If your website has a blog or newsreel, you should have an RSS feed that users can subscribe to.

10. Analytics – Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how your website performs and how successful your conversion rates are.

11. Sitemap - Adding a sitemap.xml file to your root directory allows the major search engines to easily index your website.

12. Defensive Design - The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page.

13. Optimize – You’ll want to configure your website for optimal performance.

14. Back Up – If your website runs off a database, you need a back-up strategy.

15. Print Style Sheet – If a user wants to print a page from your website, chances are she or he wants only the main content and not the navigation or extra design elements.

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10 Principles Of Effective Web Design

Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.

Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Visitors glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. In fact, there are large parts of the page they don’t even look at.
Most users search for something interesting (or useful) and clickable; as soon as some promising candidates are found, users click. If the new page doesn’t meet users’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the search process is continued.

1. Don’t make users think

2. Don’t squander users’ patience

3. Manage to focus users’ attention

4. Strive for feature exposure

5. Make use of effective writing

6. Strive for simplicity

7. Don’t be afraid of the white space

8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”

9. Conventions are our friends

10. Test early, test often

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9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design

Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face:

1. Tiny clickable areas

2. Pagination used for the wrong purpos

3. Duplicate page titles

4. Content that is difficult to scan

5. No way to get in touch

6. No way to search

7. Too much functionality that requires registration

8. Old permalinks pointing nowhere

9. Long registration forms

Usability is all about making things easier to use. Less thinking, less frustration. A website should do all the work and present visitors only with the things they’re looking for. Usability is also about the experience people have using your website, so attention to detail matters, as do the presentation and feel of the page.

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8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

1. Subliminal Suggestion
Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors.

When choosing images for your website, think carefully about the message you’re trying to send. Pick images that are meaningful and that embody that message or feeling. Don’t put graphics on your website for their own sake — if they’re not doing a job, they don’t have to be there.

2. Prevent Choice Paralysis
There is a phenomenon in marketing known as “choice paralysis.” Choice paralysis happens when the user is given too many options.  Choice is great, but when your customers are presented with too many options, they may be confused about where to go.

To remedy choice paralysis, make it easier for people to find the right product or service for them. Tell them what each option is great for, and then suggest the one they should choose.

3. Show The Product
You make your purchasing decision based on the information you gather by seeing the product.

When you sell services or Web apps online, you should do exactly the same thing: show the product. People make judgments based on what products look like. Why? Because appearance is an indicator, rightly or wrongly, of a product’s usability. This is known as the aesthetic-usability effect.

4. Let People Try It
Once you start using a product, you become involved in it. Once you start entering data into it, you begin to make it your own. Every second a user spends trying out features is a second of their time invested in learning and using your product.

5. AIDA
AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale.

The actual marketing text on the website — more than design, is what we need to do on the design side is reinforce that copy, make it stand out and ensure visitors read it. This means making sure the first thing a new visitor sees really grabs their attention.

6. Guide attention
To benefit from something like AIDA, you have to lead your visitors through your content. You can do this by aligning items in a manner that will flow, and using images that guide the eyes.

Structure your content in a way that will flow towards something. Having a bunch of scattered feature descriptions may confuse and make your visitors lost, unless of course if all of the points end in calls to action.

7. Always Provide Next Actions
If you’re designing a website to sell something, whether a software application or Web service, you should always be thinking about how you’re closing the deal on each page. This doesn’t mean filling every page with big “Buy now” buttons; it means when the customer is ready to buy, they shouldn’t have to look around for the check-out link.

8. The Gutenberg rule
The Gutenberg diagram (or the Gutenberg rule) is a concept that maps out something called reading gravity. Reading gravity describes a habit of reading in the western world: left to right, top to bottom. The Gutenberg diagram splits up a page into four quadrants: the “Primary Optical Area” in top left, the “Strong Fallow Area” in top right, the “Weak Fallow Area” in the bottom left and a “Terminal Area” in bottom right.

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Site redesign? Ask yourself these five questions

Is your website is receiving traffic, but you are not getting any conversion?
Here are five questions to ask in determining if you may need to redesign your site:

1. Are you reviewing your site stats? This is the place to start. A good stats package gives insight into how people are using your site. When a visitor enters the site, what is the path that they take? If your bounce rate (or the visitors views one page and leaves) is really high, there’s a good chance that people are not finding what they came for. People should be browsing other areas of your site, and ideally taking some action that you drove them to do . . . like filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter. etc.

2. Does the site visually reflect the company? Is your site an extension your brand and why your customers buy from you? Is it integrated with all your marketing materials? Do you give the visitor a feeling of confidence and credibility? With online fraud a major concern, the overall look of a website is a determining factor in whether a visitor believes the site is trustworthy or not. Be sure not to miss 43 web design mistakes you should avoid.

3. What valuable content is in the site? Is the information your visitor looking for on the site? Are you driving traffic to pages that may be misleading or not enough information? Do you have a call to action on the page? Are your keywords for your industry reflected in the content? If the information is not there, your visitors won’t stay. 79% of sites are scanned and not read, is your copy concise and written for the web?

4. Do I have good site usability? Can the visitor find what they are looking for or is there too much going on visually for them to even find it. This can be a problem in sites that are a few years old, multiple users updating or sites that have site architecture that does not meet the needs of the content included. Have a fresh set of eyes take a look at the site, you may be surprised on how difficult some tasks may be on your site

Is the site all Flash, or do you have a splash page? When used for your entire site, it does not encourage the user to interact with your site. If you have a “skip” button on the page, you should probably remove the page. These pages are simply barrier for the search engines and users to get into your site.

5. How do I stack up to my competition? Your site should visually and functionally reflect those of your competitors. Your existing and potential customers may be looking at those site also. Don’t limit yourself to companies that you compete with locally. Look at what similar successful businesses in other cities are doing. Make sure to review best practices in your industry as well.

63% of consumers turn to the Internet first when looking for a local product or service. Your website is accessible by more people than any of your marketing materials. Make your site a priority by keeping it updated.

Improving your shopping cart conversion rates

One of the primary areas where retailers regularly lose sales from potential customers is the checkout process.

Enclosing the checkout process is something which is proven to reduce checkout abandonments, but are retailers adopting this approach?

Prior to giving some examples of how some retailers are presenting their checkout process, it is worth summarising some of the main benefits and rationale behind enclosing the checkout process:

• All unnecessary distractions are removed, such as search functionality and primary navigation, allowing the visitor to focus purely on completing their purchase
• Information which is key to giving the visitor confidence to complete their purchase is made much more prominent, such as delivery details and customer service contact details
• Security assurances are made more visible to provide wary visitors with the added confidence that their personal and payment details will be handled securely
• It is made absolutely clear to visitors where they are within the checkout process and how many steps they have left to complete their purchase

When visitors have made their commitment to start a checkout process with a retailer, the retailer should do everything they can to help them get through the process as quickly and efficiently as possible. All un-necessary distractions and usability barriers, such as a lack of security assurances and unclear delivery charges, should be eliminated.

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