Warning: Is Your Website Being Read?

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HttpThe premise behind the new book Ordinary Greatness, by Pamela Bilbrey and Brian Jones, is that there are people all around who are everyday people doing great things every day.  One of the ideas they promote deserves attention: Read at least six books a year. What a way to keep your marketing skills up to date, and up your awareness of the world around you. It will help you become great.

One of the ways many of us get our information nowadays, however, is not in books. (How sad, sayeth I.)  We get info doing exactly the way you are doing it right now. We read the web.

And here’s some interesting statistics they found that are relevant to our customers who provide information to customers on the web.

“Scholars form University College of London found that people who get their knowledge from online sources do it in a very distinctive way: They bounce from one source to another, rarely reading the piece in its entirety. The study reports: “It is clear that users are not ‘reading’ online in the traditional sense: indeed, there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, content pages and abstracts going to quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

What does that mean to you as you design your websites? What successful designs for your web pages have you found? Give us your ideas.

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Time Friday, September 25th, 2009, 12:32 pm   |   CategoryDesign, Social Marketing, Uncategorized  |  RssRSS feed |  CommentRespond  |  TrackbackTrackback

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  • http://www.mindbodyom.com Tisha Morris

    That is such a great point! Not only are people turning to online content as opposed to newspapers, magazines, and books, but they are ‘reading’ in an entirely new way. Fascinating! And it makes since because now that you mention it, that’s exactly how I ‘read’ web content. And, yes, very applicable when it comes to presenting my own online content.

  • http://www.60SecondMarketer.com JamieTurner

    Tisha,

    thanks for the comment. This new reading style has prompted us to try to make our eNewsletter links more clean and, I dunno, I guess “glancer-friendly”. Readers want to be able to skim without the distractions of lots of words.

  • http://www.abccopywriting.com/ Tom Albrighton

    The key is to make sure your meaning can be understood even at the briefest of readings. It’s not a new problem for the copywriter though – direct marketers have been grappling with this for decades, trying to ensure people stay with their sales letters instead of moving on to something else.

    Some ideas are:
    - Ensure headline tells the whole story, as far as possible
    - Use sub-headings to flesh out the story
    - Following on from those two points, don’t use ‘teaser’ or riddle headings (unless they really sum up the meaning, as with this article)
    - Use very short paragraphs, so people can skip around more easily and don’t give up
    - Keep overall page lengths short (probably 350 words absolute max)
    - Reduce on-page clutter. Don’t give people more reason to click away than they already have! The animated tag cloud on this page is great, but it does draw the eye away from the text
    - Restate the key message at the end. Again, direct marketers do this with a ‘PS’ message in their letters
    - Consider using pull-out (boxed) quotes, although be mindful of the danger of distracting from the main text
    - Don’t make the text too small! Web designers will try and make it tiny so it looks nice. Google just made their home page text bigger for a reason.

    Hope these points help!

  • http://www.60SecondMarketer.com Jamie Turner

    Hi, Tom –

    Thanks for adding to the story — you’ve done what all good blog comments do, which is to add good content to an existing post. Thank you!

    There’s a video on the 60 Second Marketer that’s about web design that may be worth watching. The main point (made in the post above, too) is that people don’t read websites, they WATCH them. In other words, they skim until they find something worth diving into.

    Thanks again for your comment, Tom.

    Best,
    Jamie Turner

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