Thanks to a friend, I got wind of this TIME article which talked about why we look at some ads and not others.
If you’ve got time, go read “Why we look at some web ads and not others” .
If you don’t have time, this is a quick summary.
* Advertisers are often wrong about what attracts our attention.
* The simpler the ad, the better (and cheaper to produce too).
* The average time a person spent looking at an ad, though, was brief — one-third of a second.
* Text-only ads received the most glances.
* On the Internet, what we’re attracted to is content that gets us to where we want to go.
It resonates with what we’ve been telling clients all the while. Focus on giving great information. Information your competitors aren’t giving/telling. We’re an information-hungry crowd online.
That is why text still rules online.
The Same Thing for Websites
If you look at web ads and these findings above, you can posit the same thing for websites.
That is, the simpler the website the better. (I said simple, not ugly. Please don’t confuse the two.)
That is, on a website, we are attracted to web content because it gets us where we want to go.
That is, animation or Flash or ‘interactive’ elements don’t really attract attention. They’re novelty, yes, but what happens when novelty wears off? This is where we start going back to our first intention anyway – eyeing good information.
Interestingly, have you ever wondered by Google is becoming the search engine of choice? Notice any difference between Google and Yahoo home pages?
One is sleek and clean with lots of white space. There’s NOTHING to distract you from your goal of searching.
The other is full of eye-popping stuff, from news to email, from weather reports to gossip. And after the 305th time searching this way, is it any wonder that this search engine isn’t much loved?
So when you’re building your website, keep these points in mind.
And your customers will love you for it.