Who Will People Really Read Your Small Business Web Site?

You may have spent quite a bit of time designing your web site and writing the copy for it, or you may have spent quite a bit of money and had it all done by a professional designer and copywriter. But there are about 4 billion websites on the internet. Thats a lot of competition for your site, so how do you get people to actually read your copy? There have been several interesting studies about website reading patterns and usability. Theyre referenced at the bottom of this article. Website users generally leave a site that takes longer than 7 seconds to load, and the average visit length is just over 1 minute. So assuming your site loads in less than 7 seconds, you have on average, one minute to convince your visitor to stay. And how do you get them to stay? The answer is simple: content, content, content. But it takes an average of 5 to 7 visits in order to get people to buy your product or service, so how do you get them to come back? By changing your content on a regular basis. Delete text, add text. Add whole pages from time to time, and consider splitting long pages into two. According to research, content in and of itself is not enough. There are several factors to consider when building a superior web site. Several studies tell us how to improve any web site. How Viewers Read Web Sites Would it surprise you to know that most web site users wont really read your web site? Thats what Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes found in a 1997 study. What they found is that 79% will scan your web site, and only 16% read it word for word. Their recommendations are to use scannable text by using: Highlighted words Meaningful sub-headings Bulleted lists One idea per paragraph Inverted pyramid style Half the word count of conventional writing Lets look at what the W3school says too. Their article Web Site Design confirms that users scan rather than read, leaving in a few seconds if they dont feel theyve found what theyre looking for. The W3school suggests using short sentences and paragraphs, and breaking up excess information into different pages. Lets talk for a moment about the inverted pyramid style because thats probably the only term you may not have heard before. Remember the papers you used to have to write in high school or for university? Typical they start with an introduction, then move to background information and discussion, then to findings and finally to a conclusion and recommendations. All that means you have to read a lot of information before you reach a conclusion and recommendations What Nielsen and Morkes are suggesting is to invert the pyramid. You could write your web site as a variation of the inverted pyramid by writing a summary first, and adding detail after the summary. Most people dont scroll, but writing your web site inverted pyramid style just might convince them to. How Writing Style Affects Readability Nielsen and Morkes measured the effect of different styles of writing on five versions of the same website. A site with promotional copywriting was the control version, and each of the other four sites used one of the following versions and had the following improvement in per cent according to their test readers: Concise version with about half the word count as the control: 58% Scannable layout with the same text as the control but easily scanned: 47% Objective language using neutral rather than subjective, boastful or exaggerated language: 27% Combined version using all three: 124% Tracking Their Eye Movements In 2003 and 2004 Eyetrack completed a study called Eyetrack III. Their study was for news-type sites, but what they found will also help us structure our small business web site.