How Web Visitors Read News Sites and What It Means to You

The Stanford Poynter Project has been studying how Web users read and absorb news over the past four years. In that time, the technology and methodology available to them has improved from simply videotaping Web users while they scroll through pages to actually tracking eyeball movement and correlating it to content on pages. This study is only about news and is based on watching visitors read news of their choosing, but it''s the first study of its kind and offers the only hard data we have about how Web visitors absorb content on a page. While this doesn''t address many questions of Web merchants, I think it''s irresponsible to ignore the results, when so much is hinging on the experience visitors have at your site.

Summary of Results
In a nutshell, the results tell us that, to some degree, we''ve been persuaded by graphic artists and designers, and that site design, layout, and graphics are important to Web site visitors. Yet, the results of this study clearly show that text reigns supreme to Web news readers. Web site visitors want content, not glitz. Captions or headlines are the first things that readers notice. While 64% of photographs got noticed, that pales in comparison to article texts and captions, which were noticed 92% and 82% of the time, respectively.

Perhaps more surprisingly, banner ads were noticed 45% of the time, for an average of 1 1/4 seconds each. This is long enough for the reader to absorb the content of a static banner, but not an animated banner - makes you scratch your head, doesn''t it? Perhaps the banner is not dead; it just needs to settle down a bit.

Recommendations
The first recommendation is that sites should focus more on their captions and briefs. If the first thing read is a caption - and often before the entire page has finished loading - then the caption has to be compelling enough to engage the reader, and keep him on the page long enough to see more detail about the topic. How often do we rely on a product name as the caption for a product description page, rather than offering something more tantalizing? Consider a children''s catalog I came across recently. The caption for an expensive art easel for toddlers read, "This easel will be such a hit, you''ll need another refrigerator." Clever teasers like that will surely hold more readers on your page than "Art Easel."

The second recommendation is to edit photos and graphics so that they make the point quickly. If you have a print catalog, don''t assume that the graphic or photo from the print catalog will translate well to the Web.

The third recommendation relates to banner ads. Try to stick to static banner ads, if possible, and put the energy into making them clever rather than into making them active. If you must have an animated banner, make sure that each of the animations makes a point about the product or site advertised. Don''t assume the reader will see all the animations. At a minimum, include the logo and site or product name in every animation.

My own recommendation, to add to their three, is that you click over to the Poynter site and read the article Putting the Study to Good Use, which you can find in their table of contents. With as few hard facts as we have about how Web visitors absorb the material on our site, and as much money as we spend delivering sites to our visitors, we can''t afford to overlook such relevant information.

Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. Her newest book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena will be out in October. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com