Does Your Website Induce Seizures?

Does Your Web site Induce Seizures?

QUESTION:

We promote our net web site in all our ad campaigns, but according to my site statistics program, we are receiving extremely number of guests who click past the first web page. The web page has a cool Flash introduction web page that the designer said would impress visitors, but it doesn`t seem to become working. What can we do to obtain men and women to spend a lot more time on the web site? -- Christopher O.

ANSWER:

The first point you ought to do, Christopher, is come across that designer and beat the living Flash out of him. It will not increase the time guests spend in your web page, but it will make you sense better right after you`ve read this column.

What your designer thought would appeal to visitors is probably the very thing that is definitely driving them away. A Flash introduction web page (Macromedia Flash is often a software program applied to make animations for Net pages) may seem "cool" to you, but from a web site visitor`s point of look at, they can be about as appealing as sitting while in the front row of a Pokemon movie with four hundred screaming six year olds (and right here comes the segue, people).

In December, 1997, during an episode of Pokemon, the popular Japanese TV cartoon that has spawned everything from movies to action figures to lunch boxes, a scene featured a rocket explosion that flashed red and blue lights in rapid succession.

Right after the episode, over 600 children were taken to hospitals complaining of seizures, blurred vision, headaches, dizziness, and nausea. Any adult who has ever before been exposed to Pokemon for far more than two seconds can fully grasp the nausea, but the seizures at first baffled doctors.

Scientists ultimately came to attribute the mass reaction to "photosensitive seizures," which are brought on by exposure to specific visual stimuli like rapidly flashing lights on a TV screen.

Remember when your mom told you not to sit so close to the TV or you`d ruin your eyes? Turns out she knew what she was talking about. Who knew?

The event caused such concern that Japanese broadcasters and health officials met to discuss ways to prevent future occurrences of bad-cartoon induced illnesses. They established suggestions to the broadcast of flashing images: no image may well flicker faster than a few times per second; flashing images really should be displayed for no much more than two seconds; and stripes, whorls, and concentric circles ought to not acquire up the largest portion of a TV screen.

It`s my humble opinion that these rules need to apply to web pages as well. I`ve been in the net design business for nearly a decade and I have been witness to numerous sites that could induce photosensitive seizures in blind moles. It sounds like your site may possibly be suffering from a similar ailment.

If visitor`s are not clicking past your fancy Flash intro page, you don`t have to be considered a genius to figure out that therein lies your problem. Remove the Flash intro web page for a few weeks to determine if your website`s click-through rate improves and the number of page views increase. "Click-through rate" refers towards the amount of guests who click hyperlinks in your homepage to go deeper into your website. "Page views" refers towards the overall quantity of net pages that were viewed by visitors. If click-through and page watch rates improve, you may know that the Flash intro was your problem.

Here are a few other factors you`ll be able to do to generate confident your website offers guests a pleasant - and seizure totally free - browsing experience.

Sit Within the Visitor`s Chair

The greatest way to generate confident your web page is as user friendly as it is often, is to sit down at a pc and approach your web site from a typical visitor`s point of see. Try to imagine that you happen to be seeing the internet site to the first time. For those who are unable to do this, have a friend that has never observed the web-site click about and offer you comments when you consider notes.

Have your friend assess the subsequent factors: Is definitely the web-site appealing for the eye? Are the colors pleasing and complimentary? Is definitely the internet site easy to navigate? Are the topical categories and subcategories in logical order? Is it simple to obtain what you are seeking? Does the web-site possess a search engine to make finding things easier? Is every single feature with the web-site significantly less than two or three clicks away? If the answer to any or all of these points is no, you may have some operate to perform.

Don`t Dictate Technology

One particular sure fire way to repel internet web page visitors is to require that they`ve special browser plug-ins or 3rd party add-on browser software installed to look at your web page. Dictating that the user download and install software is not your spot and users will resent you (and your business) for it. Visiting your site really should be an easy pleasure, not a technological chore.

Do not Make Them Wait

In case your homepage takes longer than 20 seconds to download (seem while in the visitor`s browser) you are dropping guests, period. Gratuitous animation, large graphics, poorly formatted HTML, bad web page layout, and quite a few other factors can increase download time. You could possibly have the greatest internet web site within the globe, but if it takes ten minutes to download no 1 will actually see it.

The lessons to become learned, then, are threefold. One particular: a site should be designed to satisfy the visitor`s requirements, not to pacify the web page designer`s ego.

Two: visitors to a business internet site are not there to become awed and entertained. They`re there searching for information, and unless you give it to them promptly and easily, they will go elsewhere to acquire it.

And 3: for better mental and physical health avoid Pokemon at all costs.

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