Webpage layout: Mind your F’s and Milliseconds

Did you know that it takes a user just 50 milliseconds to make up their mind about a website? This is known as the ‘halo’ effect and was discovered by Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University.

If people have a good first impression of your website, they’re likely to think the same about other areas of your website such as your content.

Hot on the heels of my post about what content and copy works on web pages for lead generation, I’ve included a guideline for the factors to consider for layout and visuals on a website.

1. Top of page: Position the most important information at the top of the fold. This could include:

Brief introduction
Video
Banner
Promotions
Your company in the news

2. Mind your F’s: People read in F patterns. Did you notice the layout of this page yet? And how about this one from IBM?

3. Quick links: Make it easier for your visitors to navigate your website with anchor text linking to sub sections.

4. Internal linking: Link to other pages of your website. This makes for better user navigation as well as making your website more SEO friendly.

5. Landing pages: Aside from the SEO benefits and giving your visitors lots of interesting things to read about, here are a few reasons for using landing pages:

Pointing traffic from social media to a page geared to feel more ‘social’ in tone
Creating pages specifically for content
Boosting time spent on website
Emphasising a particular industry area. For example, I’ve created landing pages for the most profitable target sectors for an industry. This enables you to target more niche areas with high relevance.

6. Highlight important information: Whether that’s through headers, subheaders, bold text, visuals or power bars, this makes it as easy as possible for visitors to spot what they are looking for.

Especially as you have just 20th of a second to do it.

Examples of what to include: