This is a sad fact but true, people don’t read as much as they did before. Not just for books, this awkward situation also happens when people browsing websites. So how to grasp your users’ attention in a short time, here are 5 tips you may find useful while managing your web content.
Tip 1. Smart titles help users to understand your content easier
No one really enjoys reading long paragraphs without been informed about the overall idea in advance. Especially when they don’t really have enough time, it’s totally a disaster.
However, appropriate titles, or headlines, can help people get a general idea immediately. This would definitely help reading become a much easier task. Particularly for busy people nowadays, they don’t have to finish those paragraphs word by word. By going through the titles, they gets information quickly, which of course, would save a lot of time for them.
Just try to consider your website as an article with a rich content, in which smart titles for this whole article as well as its paragraphs are essentially needed. For instance, by adding a “title" on your homepage, without browsing around, people can understand what your website is about and what it can do for them. Remember, first impression will always affect people’s choice. So please make sure this title is powerful, attractive and most importantly, accurate.
Tip 2.Important information always goes first
People can’t concentrate for a long time. If your content attracts their attention, great, but you also need to know that the strength of people’s attention has a certain pattern: once it starts, it gradually gets weaker, until it totally disappears. Usually, people’s attention can only last for 10 minutes.
So if you have something important, say it first.
For the same reason, when you are managing the content for your website, it’s always a good idea to put the information you expect people to notice in the first place. In another word, leave those great space, such as the upper part of each page or block, to the most important messages.
Tip 3. Make sure your content is understandable
People hate thinking, so don’t make the content on your website to complicated for them to understand. Let me put it this way, try to explain your idea simply and directly.
Here is a readability index calculator recommended by Susan Weinschenk, which would help you check if your content is understandable enough: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php
Besides, as you might know, content is not just about texts only. Images, or even videos are also included. People are born to be visual animals, that’s why photos, illustrations, visual icons can help your communication be more effective.
Videos can also be considered as a good way to convey your ideas. But bear this in mind, it’s not a brilliant idea to allow videos plays automatically on your website. It will be super annoying especially when your users are sitting in some quiet environment, like an office.
Tip 4. Repeat and remind
What you should understand about memory is, actually there are two kinds of memories, short-term memory and long-term memory. When a person browses a website, memories he might create are short-term memories, which are not going to last for a very long time. So don’t expect people can remember everything when they just quickly scanned your website.
But it is still possible to impress your users with some technics. The trick is, highlight those messages you want people to notice, and smartly repeating them on your website. This can help remind people of those information, and finally affect them before they realise. Unconsciously, their short-term memories may have chance to be converted to long-term memories. Which means, your message would be successfully conveyed to your users.
Tip 5. No more than 4 points at one time
I can understand that you might have a lot to say to your target audiences. However, According to Baddeley’s research, there is a limitation of people’s memory. That is, each time, their memory can only carry less than 4 items.
When the issue comes to web content management, I would suggest you to include no more than 4 points each time. But if you have much more to talk about, try to separate them into different groups, and within each group, you could list at most 4 items. In this way, people can get your message much better.