Compelling Marketing Communications

Beware the Five-Second Rule

Everybody knows the "five second rule" for dropping food on the floor, but are you aware that there's also five-second rules for the web? Pages that take more than five seconds to load, for example, tend not to be viewed. Another example is that if a web site takes longer than five seconds to give the visitor the information they're looking for, that visitor will probably leave. Some experts are suggesting that the attention span of the web user is dropping even more, to around two seconds. Either way, there is not a lot of time to capture your visitor's attention.

When a visitor comes to your web site, what's the very first thing they see? Do they see a video or flash animation? Is it a large image especially one that takes a long time to load? Do they see your vision statement or a mission statement? What information do you convey to a visitor in those first critical seconds of making an impression?

In our last newsletter we mentioned that the window of this first impression is shrinking. While some web sites, even those run by Fortune 500 companies, waste this time trying to impress their visitors with fancy web tricks, you should be seizing this opportunity to show them you have what they want.

For a business web site, there's really only one reason that a first-time visitor finds your site: they have a question they want answered. So, what questions are you answering? They should be ones like: What does your company do? How can they help your customers? What services or products do you offer or support? When will a product or service be delivered? In other words, give the people what they want, and they want information.

Some business owners make the mistake of trying to emulate popular web sites. Many of the most popular web sites, however, are social networking, news, or recreational ones which play by different rules. A visitor to one of those sites is ready and willing to spend time just hanging out or puttering around. By contrast, a visitor to a company web site wants to get their answers and then get on with whatever they were doing.

By "providing answers" we don't mean "drown in text." As we said last time, few things are more off-putting than walls of words. Graphic and dynamic elements can often convey your message better than text. The key is providing the information clearly in whatever form is best for your users.

Compelling Marketing Communications has experience in designing and tuning web sites to address customer needs quickly. We will be discussing some further aspects for effective web site design in our next newsletter, which comes out the third Tuesday of every month. We'll see you on August 17th.

(860) 604-5573 | Bill@CompellingMarketingCommunications.com

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