The large amount of websites that are present on the internet today makes it hard for a single website to grab the attention of the visitors. For each website there are multiple alternatives and that makes it important to grab the attention of the visitor in the first seconds of their visit.

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There are multiple ways of grabbing your visitors attention. The page where the user enters the website, wether it’s the homepage or a specific landing page, needs to make clear what the visitor can and (obviously) can’t find on the website.

Visitors of a website in the year 2008 don’t go pogosticking around to check where they can find the information they need. They want it right that moment, in the right spot, or else they will leave to find the information on another website.

Attention comes before fascination

Once a visitors enters a specific page, there are a number of thoughts running through his of her mind. The first one will be obiviously; “Does this page contain the information I’m looking for?”. It doesn’t matter what the visitor is looking for, or where the visitor comes from, it all comes down to this question. If the answer is yes, the attention is there and the user will continue scanning the page.

If the answer is no, there are several things happening at the same time. The visitor is looking for connections with other pages in the form of links, that connect to pages that contain the wanted information. At the same moment a countdown starts to count, once the visitor can’t find anything that fits his needs within a specific amount of time, he will leave.

Our job is to create and show the connections on our main landing pages, in a way that the visitor will know what he or she can find, once he or she enters the website via that page. It’s sounds simple but it really is hard to imagine what a visitor is thinking once he or she sees the specific page. Your website needs to be like a good coordinated metro system, where everything is connected to everything in a clear way.

Decide what is most important, in the way a visitor thinks

Imaging a blog, like this one for instance. Most blog show the newest posts first and each time a new post is publiced, all posts move down one spot to make space for the new post. Eventually they will move to the next page. This is because most visitors of blogs want to read the newest posts first.

The same thing goes for any other website, the information and pages that visitors are most interested in, should be available from a place where people expect it to be. A webshop needs to show products with a nice discount in a top position, for example in a small section of the sidebar, which is viewable from most pages.

Each kind of website has their own specific points where we wan’t to put more emphasis on. The question to keep in mind is; “What would I be looking for, if I would enter this website via this page, while looking for …”. It really is a great idea to think the way a user thinks, while developing a page, or a complete website. Think the way visitors think, create the connections that you would like to be there, if you would be the visitor of the website.

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