26. Breast implants
Don’t be shy about what you have to offer to visitors. Be proud, be daring and give them a bit of metaphorical cleavage to whet their appetites.
Imagine you are dressing a nice but dim man/woman up for an evening on the town. Emphasise all that is good and tell them to keep their mouth shut.
Up And To The Front
No matter how much or little content you have within your web site, the key to using space effectively is to push it up and to the front. The simple rule is to push the most appealing or important products or articles to the top of the page, with everything else forming a frame. These words, images or products are your best assets – your family jewels – and must be promoted and supported accordingly. Bearing in mind that many users won’t scroll to the bottom of the page, ever, what is above the fold (and therefore will be seen the most) must entice, tease and fulfil your visitor’s curiosity enough to read on.
Having said this, under no circumstances leave users who do venture to the nether regions of the page completely stranded. Give them a way to move on, through links that replicate the buttons at the top of the page, without making them scroll all the way back up to the top. Let them move on, and sharpish.
Give Me The Full Hit
Let users click on the image to see a bigger version – don’t hit them with large images in the first instance. Tease with a thumbnail image and a little bit of text. If that gets their mouse salivating, then they’ll click to find out more. If thumbnails are unsuitable, provide a medium-sized image to begin with (about 144 5 200 pixels) and let them click again to see it in all its glory – any more will be too slow to load and will negate the impact of the larger image, because the user will get bored waiting – especially if there are several images on the page.
When you do offer buttons, images or links on a page, ensure that the name of the destination page is exactly the same as the button or link used to get there. If Fred clicks on a link to read more about Korean Heating Systems, make sure the page he arrives at is titled Korean Heating Systems (not Korean Eating Systems).
Too Many Cooks…
Busy sites do not inspire the visitor to make an effort to read or look at what is on offer. The old maxim of less is more once again comes into play in terms of positioning your text, images, buttons and links. This will make the page top heavy and might leave your bottom a tad underdressed. But don’t worry – you can use that space effectively to showcase second level products/promotions/information using good text and good images.
Just Like a Filing Cabinet
Tabs are a great way to visually show what you have on offer and let your users choose what areas of the site they are interested in viewing. By running the categories of your web site along the top of the page you are saving valuable real estate on the rest of the page for even more buttons or showcasing of products. This is a convention that was pioneered and championed by Amazon and has now become the industry standard. The trick is to ask your developers to use as few images as possible. Text based is best, but if you are determined to use images, keep them simple. Ensure that your tabs are colour coded and it’s obvious to the user which category or product range they are currently within. To show that your buttons are in fact tabs, it makes sense to automatically select a tab when users first log on to your site – this can either be a generic welcome page or the most popular product range.
How did it go?
Q. The buyers say that there is simply too much on our site to leave out. It must all be represented on the homepage. How can I argue against that?
A. Refuse. It’s back to too much noise. You will only be diluting your own offering if you try to cram it all in onto the homepage. Certainly give users the option of travelling around the site through navigation options, but use space effectively and don’t try to cram.
Q. How do we go about choosing which links and images to leave in and which to temporarily remove?
A. First choose those links, products and images which have led to positive sales in the past. If that doesn’t work, you can always run the exercise again with another set of products.
Here is an idea for you…
Try to convince the other product managers or content providers responsible for your site to remove half of the images, text, sections, links and references on your homepage for one week only. All of these articles or products will still be available through the various buttons and links – but the actual homepage will be showcasing a fraction of what it used to. Your conversion ratio (the number of users reading the information or buying products) will rise and you won’t see a huge drop in the sales or consumption of other areas of the site.
If this works in principle, look to adopt the theory across the web site. The text that you remove need not be wasted; it can placed in new sections of the site that will still be read by users so long as you show them where to find it.
Defining idea…
‘Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but is also a disruption of thought.’
Arthur Schopenhauer
Defining idea…
‘If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.’
Larry Leissner