Chris Cardell Review

Not only does the content of your web-pages count – the headline, pictures, body-copy, and so on – but the layout is also very important.

Clever research methods where viewers’ eyeball movements are electronically tracked over time as they read a variety of web-pages, show us conclusively that there’s a preferred viewing path which the majority of people follow with their eyes when they view your web-page.

Here’s how this relates to your online Profits.

Let’s remember our task: to grab our visitors’ attention and make them stop for the vital 8 seconds or so it takes for us to get over the “hump” of their short attention span. Chances are, if we can keep them for those precious 8 seconds, we can keep them long enough to get them to take the action we want.

Given that this is our task – doesn’t it make sense for us to make sure the page-elements we know make the biggest difference in response are placed where they statistically get more attention, so we can get that attention earlier?

The typical reading path is top to bottom, left to right, just how we read a book in the Western world. Your eyes begin at the top on the left and then follow a zig-zag pattern down the page as you read.

We can take advantage of this in two ways.

First, we have the headline at the top (so the first letter of the headline is in the top-left corner, right where the eye begins scanning the page), followed by any images or pictures we’re using to help make the sale.

It’s vitally important that any pictures you use have a caption with a meaningful sales message in them: picture-captions get high readership so putting them right up in the top-left corner is guaranteed to give them the very highest chance of being read (remember those 8 seconds!). The top-left is also a great place to put video: remember, it’s where the eye gets to first in the vital 8 seconds – it means your video is more likely to be watched! We need to reveal our biggest and most powerful promises and tools at the earliest point we can to ensure we’ve got the visitor’s attention. If we don’t do that, then anything else on the page is irrelevant, because they’ll have surfed off to another page.

The second thing that we can do is ensure the logical path of the page contents follows the physical path – meaning this is a good time to remind yourself of the AIDA formula: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

This might seem obvious, but if it is, then a lot of people are missing the obvious, probably because website designers typically know if something looks “nice” without knowing what makes it actually useful!

So, because the call to action is the last thing you want them to do, then the means to do that should be at the bottom of the page. It can be useful to have links in the body copy under appropriate “mini calls to action”, but there’s still the logical flow.

The key is to marry the physical reading path of the eye with the logical reading and decision-making path of the brain: start with the biggest promise at the top left to get their attention, then follow the natural zig-zag pattern down to the logical conclusion – and the sale.

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