|
|
Tapping Into The Visual Stimulus Of Your Web Site Visitors
"Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What an eye sore. Quick, click away! Click away!"
Suddenly I wake up in a cold sweat. What happened. Oh, then I realize: it was just a nightmare.
O.k., I'm not crazy, and no I haven't had this dream before. But think about this: what would you do if you came to a site littered with either tons of different colors, loud pinks, purples, greens and reds mixed incoherently, or more animations and graphics than the rods and cones of your inner eye can possibly absorb? If your like me I simply go "click, bye-bye".
Our visual stimulus is ever more so important on the web than almost anywhere else. Most definitely the internet is about information. But, that information is shown graphically. So, if you want to keep people at your site, first appeal to their visual stimulus.
There are a few guidelines that you should adhere to when designing your site, following known research results on colors that elicit certain psychological responses people. The bottom line is that it is hard enough to market on the internet today, why make it harder by bugging your visitors.
(1) Colors and Their Effect: I prefer blue and white. In general blue seems to elicit a sense of trust and white a sense of purity. Gold, on the other hand is the color of wealth and prosperity, something we are all working towards. So, with respect to general internet marketing, these colors tend to work the best. They are easy on the eyes and don't strike up a sense of danger, such as with the color red. Of course, the colors also depend on purpose of your site. If selling baby items, pink, which represents femininity, and baby blue, representing weakness may work quite well. It depends in part on site content. A high tech site selling electronic components may do better with greys, silvers, and black.
(2) Animations and Banners: Animations are nice, but can take time to load and be distracting. Use them to focus the attention of a visitor. Place them at a single page location, at the center or all at the left side for instance. If you use more than one and they are scattered all over the page, where can you expect your eyes to focus. Yep, you heard right - click, bye, bye.
Banners can also give you problems if there are two many and not well organized. Pay attention to the color design to ensure that it matches your site. Remember, no eye sores here. Overall, banner are known not to have the highest clickthrough rates.
(3) Flash Media: Flash media animations are steadily gaining popularity and many sites are tailoring their start-up page to include large flash animations. Beware. In online home businesses, your primary purpose is content. Only fit in flash where it is strictly meant to guide the visual stimulus to a part of your site. I know, I know, it does look cool. But cool doesn't and never will build sales out of potential prospects.
A few further resources that are of particular interest here are
(1) http://www.internet-marketing-research.net,
(2) http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html,
(3) http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa031501a.htm.
As a good rule of thumb, if it hurts your eyes, it probably hurts others as well. Keep it simple, professional, easy to look at with color used just in the right place to highlight your content. Content is what will build your home based business. Elicit a visual response from your visitors to drive them to your content.
About The Author
Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics, two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his Home Based Business site.
Do Your Website Yourself - 4 Simple Steps to Get Your Dreams on the Web
Many people hire professional web site designers for as much as a thousand plus USD! You can, and very easily, make a web site for almost one hundredth of that price, and probably in half the time. Here are 4 easy steps to get you started.
Top Six Ways To Make Your Visitors To Hate YOU!
We will take a look at why your visitors may hate you maybe already do! There are many things that make YOUR visitors dislike you, but we take a look the top sex things that make your click the back button on their browser.
Creating A Quality Web Site Design!
In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site. Now it's a known fact that the layout or "eye candy" as I put it will determine whether your visitors will stay more than 15 seconds or they will just become another statistic.
Technology vs. Usability
When JV Media Design was formed, the year was 1995 and the Internet was a very different place than it is today.
Getting Along With Your Web Designer
You're all ready to get started creating your web presence and you've found a skilled web designer to build your website for you. Do you know what he needs from you to do an efficient job? Good web design requires cooperation between the architect and the user to create a product that will serve its intended function, and you don't have to be an internet expert to do your part. There are a number of things you can do when working with a web designer during the building and maintenance phases to smooth communications, reduce confusion, get work done faster, and get the results you want.
Cascading Style Sheets for Better Web Design
In cascading style sheets you can specify how your web pages will be presented on the screen by simply predefining page elements such as fonts, headers and links.
Very Cheap Website Design Services
Are you looking for somebody to build you a website, however do not have a very large budget? This is the position many people find themselves in and are on the lookout for very cheap web design services.
6 Reasons Why Web Templates Are Todays Trend
As the Internet blooms at an alarming rate, so as the number of websites out there. Appearance, layout, presentation and loading times are just a few of the main essential characteristics of a successful website. It would seem that it is generally manageable if you own a wide level of knowledge on web / graphics design. But the main question of today's online trend, is how you can eliminate the need of going through the traditional web designing processes and timeframe.
Website Design: 10 Web Site Design Pitfalls To Avoid
If you've a website that is not generating a lot of sales, it may be due to some design flaws.
The Technology May Change, But Human Nature Remains The Same
Let me repeat that..
Adding the Right Keywords to Your Website Content
You've made your website, added a great title and keywords in the meta tags. That's it, right?
Building Web Sites Using Web Templates
Gone are the days when you had to rely on a web-designer to design your websites. New technologies with innovative ideas have brought out a new variant to this trend in the form of ready to use website templates.
Website Design: Redecorate Your Web Site To Increase Sales
Getting traffic to your website is not the only factor that affects your sales.
The Top 8 Website Sins Part Two
Sin #5
How to Avoid the Biggest Mistakes Member Sites Make in Their Marketing Copy
If you have a web site to which people pay a periodic member fee, it's likely that you belong to other member web sites and have done so for at least a year or two. Thus it's easy for you to overlook the fact that to the average person, member web sites are either a relatively new phenomenon or a completely new phenomenon. It follows that you can't afford any sloppiness or hanging back in making clear to your web site visitors that they are looking at an opportunity to sign up for a paid membership in your web site.
Through The Looking Glass
My mother used to take me along when she visited an old lady down a cobbled lane who had a crystal ball on her dining room table and a pack of playing cards. My mother was superstitious and really believed a lot of what she was told by the old lady. She wanted to know what the future held not only for herself but for me, her only little boy. I was about five or six years old at the time, and used to gaze at the reflected images upon the crystal ball of the sunlit window behind me and the lace curtains, although the old lady would place her hands at either side of the crystal ball and say that she could see the future and told of what she saw, I could only see the reflection of that window with the lace curtains. The old lady was either a genuine medium or was just guessing what my mother wanted to hear to keep her coming back for more of the same, and make herself a small income to supplement her pension.
No Matr How Goud The Infomation...
Typos, misspellings, hideous grammar, exclamation overkill and run-on sentences all undermine a Web site's message. Your reader will have to work too hard, and you won't have that reader long.
Good Websites Stand Out From The Masses Of Boring, Hard To Travel Sites
Good websites stand out from the masses of boring, hard to travel, and overly commercial sites that now rule our Cyberspace. Interactivity and integrity are necessary for a site to become a hub of activity.
Color and Web Design
Color is one of the most important but least understood elements of web design today. Whether they know it or not, visitors to a site respond to colors and other visual elements on the site on a psychological level. Color affects the emotion of the audience, and emotion drives decision-making. An intrigued visitor is more likely to engage in the goal of your site -- whether it is meant to inform, entertain, or to sell products or services. If the colors are unsuitable, the eye will reject the site and your product may be rejected too, no matter how good it is. A well-considered color scheme is frequently the difference between an okay web site and a great web site. It can also make a site unusable if the scheme used is too outrageous and hard on the eye.
50 Surefire Web Design Tips
Tips to brand your website