Designing an eCommerce site is more than making it pretty. You have certaindesired actions you're looking for from your visitors. You have specific thingsyou want to be sure they see and hopefully act on. Now, there's some researchthat can guide your design. Certainly you want your site to look professional,but you want it to do its job as effectively as possible too.



People are surprisingly alike in some of their basic visual behavior. It's beenargued that our evolution as hunter-gatherers has shaped much of our ingrainedvisual patterns. Whether you buy that particular argument or not there arestill important commonalities.

Typical behavior on initially viewing a site is to do a fast scan of the entirevisible screen with short focusing periods around the areas that attractattention. First pass tends to include headlines, the page logo, photocaptions, subheads, links and menu items. And the big hot spot is the upperleft corner of the screen. I haven't seen any definitive research on whetherthese patterns also hold for users with native languages that read any wayexcept left to right, but I'm assuming most of you are building sites forleft-to-right readers.

The clear message is that your most important real estate is in that upper leftarea and that the lower right (particularly if it's below the fold) is theleast likely to receive much attention.

How you use your words in a headline, paragraph or link can make a hugedifference in your success at capturing a visitor's attention. The concept iscalled frontloading. Wherever you can make sure your critical terms appear atthe very beginning of headlines, links and other text. It's still got to makesense, but the first few words are far more likely to be at least scanned thenthe middle or end of a headline or link or the inside of a paragraph.

The exact same words can have drastically different capture rates depending ontheir order. You want to maximize the probability that the visitor will read awhole headline or link and then act on it. So put the most significant,enticing words first - the ones that are the best grabbers and convey thesubject immediately.

You don't have a lot of time to mess about. It's been reported that a typicalsurfer may be off your page in well under 14 seconds unless something grabs hisor her attention fast. Remember the upper-left? You want to do an especiallygood job with headlines, link and text in that area.

Dropcaps (where the first capitalized letter in a line is in a different, oftenunusual, font and extends below the normal text base-line), bolding, fontchanges and color changes can also serve as strong eye-attractors. If you trythese techniques you need to be careful that you don't overuse them (your pagewill look like a mess), and it's extremely important that you test whether ornot they're actually doing what you want. Annoying as it may be, running testsis the only way to make sure it's an improvement.

Do you use lists? Have you made sure that they're in-line and as close to theleft margin as possible? Don't ever use an outline format with multipleindents. People scan down, not across and they tend to scan close to the leftmargin. Indent too much and it might as well be invisible.

An interesting testing result that I read somewhere said that somewhere between10 and 20 percent of site visitors don't even see centered headlines. Sure theylook nice and a lot of sites use them, but if they're totally missed by even 3percent of your visitors, you're paying a major price to look good. Suggestion?Put those headlines up against your left margin.

This also applies to links. Put those links up against the left margin, notinside a paragraph, centered or off to the right. And if you want any clicks ona link, never put it in that nearly unseen lower right area. Might as well justleave it off your page.

How about indented paragraphs? Now there's a great way to start an argument.Some argue that it attracts the eye, it's different, few sites use it so youstand out. Others insist that you're far better off staying left justified andfrontloading each paragraph. There's only one way to resolve it for yourself,yeah, run some tests and see what works with your visitors on your site.

The bottom line is that once you get beyond the basics of placement,frontloading, and left-justified links and headlines, you need to test if youwant to fully maximize the effectiveness of your website design. I wish therewere a simpler answer too, but in the end only testing will tell you what worksbest for your site

Contact:

Ms. Doanh Nguyen: Sales

Email: sales@blueball.com.vn

Sales Representative

International Marketing Department

Blue Ball Co. Ltd.



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