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This article is a guest post by Teeg, of SUComments.com
The first thing to remember about web 2.0 is that the web is no longer driven by whatever businesses decide to put up a website. At one time, the programmer was king, and businesses were forward-thinking if they created a web presence. Now, just about every business you can think of has a website, including the construction company working on our local mall?!?
Yesterday’s websites were huge, clunky thinks, which they could be, because most people had slow internet connections. Once someone got to your page, you knew they would likely read the content, if for no other reason than they were waiting for the next page to load. With connection speeds that could take a minute and a half or more per page, yesterday’s web design called for having a lot of different content on one page, much like a newspaper or some magazines.
When internet connections got faster, people discovered the joys of visiting page after page looking for their favorite topics. Websites that wanted to catch the attention of these users soon discovered that yesterday’s layouts weren’t working. People weren’t forced to sit and read a long page while they waited for the new page to open, they could hop on a page, see if it caught their interest, and hop off. Today, the average visitor spends less than 2 seconds on a web page. That means that you have about 1 second to catch and keep their attention. For a website designed for today’s visitors, think presentation instead of newspaper.
Have you ever watched a good presenter? He doesn’t put his whole speech up at the beginning of the program and leave it up the whole time. Instead he brings a pile of slides or power point pages, and presents 3 to 5 pieces of information on each slide. This is the perfect example for a business website. Consider each static page you create (pages like your About and Contact page, Directions to your business, and any other pages where the content remains static) as a new slide. Does the page grab your attention for 1 second? Do the important facts on the page stand out? Is there little enough information that the visitor won’t get overwhelmed and leave? Finally, and most importantly, do you grab their attention enough that they will want to click through to the next page?
This is one of the most important parts of todays websites. If the presenter gets up and tells you what the presentation is about and it doesn’t hold your interest, it’s unlikely that you’ll stay for the rest of the speech, especially if there’s something better you could be doing with your time. The internet is like a huge conference, where all the speakers are presenting at once. If I don’t catch something on a page that’s important or interesting enough to hold my attention, I’ll go to the next presenter. Even if you’re selling a product or running an off-line business, if I don’t catch a piece of information that sets you apart from the others, I won’t stay.
If you want to try this for yourself, I suggest using StumbleUpon as the easiest way to quickly visit a lot of sites with similar content. Using a web search also works, but then you’ll have to keep coming back to the search. Either way, look up a topic, or choose a topic on SU to look up, and start looking at pages. Give yourself just enough time to see the page and click the stumble (or back) button, and continue until a page catches your eye. Now look back at your website and imagine you’re a visitor coming to it the same way you just visited all the other websites. As a stranger, would you spend time on your page? Or would you go back and look for something different?
Teeg is a StumbleUpon expert, having held a Top Stumbler position for several months, before moving on to write SUComments.com, where she provides valuable insight and advice for the beginning Stumbler.
Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 6:00 amand is filed under Business, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
A great post! Puts the whole Web 2.0 thing in perspective in a simple, easy to understand message.
The only thing that I would add is that there are still a lot of people with slow connections, and we run the risk of losing them if we load too much stuff onto pages, thus making them slower to load!
I checked my blog on dial up, and found it really slow to load, and so am working to fix this as I go along!
Cheers!
A great post! Puts the whole Web 2.0 thing in perspective in a simple, easy to understand message.
The only thing that I would add is that there are still a lot of people with slow connections, and we run the risk of losing them if we load too much stuff onto pages, thus making them slower to load!
I checked my blog on dial up, and found it really slow to load, and so am working to fix this as I go along!
Cheers!
I actually found Stumbleupon years ago because I was looking for new site ideas and it turned out to be a good system to use just to see what others were doing.
I actually found Stumbleupon years ago because I was looking for new site ideas and it turned out to be a good system to use just to see what others were doing.