Web Designers; You Only Get 5 Seconds...
Published: 14th October 2006
“I’m told I have a really short attention
spa… Look! There’s a mime! I hate mimes,
don’t you?”
Whilst not immediately obvious, the above statement is
closely relevant to web designers and the internet in
general insofar as it accurately reflects the attention
span of the average surfer.
Unless you can show a visitor
what your site is about and get them interested in five
seconds or less, they will reach for the back button and
go elsewhere to find someone who can. This is a statistical
fact; visitors really are that fickle.
The problem has two major causes:
- Slow loading times
If your web page contains an excessive amount or poorly
formatted (the size of your thumbnail but half a megabyte
big) graphics, its loading times will suffer as a
result.
Web Designers sometimes forget that not everyone’s
internet connection is as fast as theirs and what loads
in a flash on their browsers, may take long enough to
make a sandwich on someone else’s machine.
Speaking of Flash; intros which take 30 seconds to load
and cannot be skipped or flash navigation systems which
take 10 to 15 seconds to respond are a definite no-no
for the same reason.
Hint: Users with enough time on
their hands to go and make a sandwich while a page loads
will get bored and go away.
- Generally obscure content or marketing message
Your site’s visitors are not looking to solve
a riddle, make sure you tell them who you are and what
you do.
”Big Bird Bakers; we bake bread” is a clear,
if somewhat bland marketing message, whereas “ThirstySystems;
synergising enterprise-wide technology”, whilst
being packed with the juicy goodness of buzzwords, has
absolutely nothing to say about what the business actually
does.
Don’t make your visitors guess about you or your
services, not if you want to turn them into paying customers
anyway.
Many web designers are simply itching to produce something
new and ‘different’, the results of which
can often combine the above causes.
So if surfers actually have the patience to make a sandwich
whilst a page loads, at least they won’t starve
whilst puzzling over its meaning.
Visitors to commercial web sites are looking for one
of three things:
- Relevant information
- A product or service to purchase
- Entertainment
Unless one or more of these requirements are satisfied
quickly once they reach a site, they become disinterested
and go elsewhere.
Unfortunately this small detail is often overlooked by
web designers more interested in producing something ‘cool’ than
whether it actually sells bread or ‘synergised enterprise-wide
technology’, whatever this may be.
Remember; five seconds isn’t a long time.
If you want to sell; sell.
If you want to be cool, do a beatnik or acid jazz site.
Many Web Designers fail to realise the fickleness of
internet surfers
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