When it comes to webpage design, who doesn’t like an attractive and fancy design? Cool backgrounds, random pictures of cats wearing hats, whatever it takes to “make people” like and remember your website. But contrary to popular belief, none of that truly matters because when someone comes to your website, they’re looking for information. Remember the days of Geocities when everyone had pictures of dancing babies on their webpage and a whole bunch of other misc animated pictures? Yeah…notice how those aren’t so prevalent anymore? If you want to keep people on your website, and convert casual visitors into sales, it’s text, not graphics that designers and decision makers should be thinking about.
To find out where people are clicking on your own website and where they aren’t, you can employ the use of a heatmap. This heatmap will tell you through a colored visual output where people are clicking, and where they aren’t. If you’re a decision maker, the light bulb might be going off above your head right now because maybe important content isn’t placed in the best, optimized, location. Google Anlaytics allows the ability to see a heatmap, but for a more elegant solution, take a look at Crazyegg.
For general reference, this picture is an overall good guide as to where the hot zones are on a page:
3.5 takeaways:
1) Move content around on the homepage and other landing pages so that important text is immediately visible “above the fold.”
2) Make sure your calls to actions (CTA’s) are placed in optimal locations where visitors are likely to click.
3) Don’t give your visitors any confusion when it comes to what that particular page is about. Make sure they don’t need to scroll around to figure out the who, what, when, where, how.
3.5) When in doubt, employ A/B split testing to see which method of display is working better than the other.
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P.S. This is not to say that graphics aren’t important, and it’s quite the contrary. Pictures, charts, graphics, etc. are a great way to keep users engaged. It’s just crucial to organize content to make sure important information is in the correct location on a page!