After years of clients wanting fancy sites with flash animation home pages, downloadable videos and bckground music, I’m pleased to say that things are getting simpler – For the surfer that is. At one point it seemed like every site had to use the full colour palette to be noticed – if we’ve got 256 colours why weren’t we using them!
For many years and for many site owners , the online world appeared to be image obsessed, to the detriment of content.
Of course what the client wants is important – but surely the surfer claims a higher priority? After all they are the potential customer and the site’s target audience.
These days I reckon even the newbie surfer is more savvy than previous generations – they come to the web looking for one thing and one thing only – Information!
If your site loads quickly and is clearly what they are looking for, you are in with a chance – after all the average eyeball time on the web is 4.7 secs – that’s how long it takes for the surfer to decide whether or not they’ve got the right page, prior to clicking away!
In google analytics terms this number is measured by the ‘Bounce Rate’ statistic – The lower the number the less folk are getting away quickly ! If you survive the eyeball test, your site now has to provide useful content that is arranged in a structured way, in other words you must have a navigation system that is easy to use and understand.
This is where our new generation of Wordpress sites come into their own – they load very quickly indeed, display information in a clear, easy to understand way and the menu systems are extremely easy to understand. That’s why they convert at twice the rate of regular websites that rely on fixed html pages.
By the way – they score well in google too – often increasing traffic levels by around 200%
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