Getting Attention
When you hire Billboard advertising or TV advertising the first thing it’s got to do is grab your attention. Often we’re shown messages like,..
- ’WE’VE GONE CRAZY!!’ or
- ’EVERYTHING HAS TO GO!!’ or the ever popular
- ’I’M WEARING A BIKINI’
,..before the ad settles into actually telling you about the product.
It’s hardly surprising that I’m often given a brief for a web-site that goes along the lines of ’it’s got to be attention getting’.
An attention getting web-site looks great in the design stages. There’s no better way to get your boss on board when something grabs their attention. Web site designers often manage to sell their skills by ’grabbing’ that ’attention’.
The big secret though, is this.
If your customer is looking at your website in the first place, then you’ve already got their attention. By the time they are sitting in front of a monitor with your URL in the address field, they are already up to the ’tell me about your product’ stage.
They don’t care about flash intros. They have no interest in animated gifs, and quite frankly, there are a lot more effective ways to look at people in bikinis on the Internet. They want to see your products and services and so the job of the site is to make that as easy as possible for them to do.
It’s not about ’getting their attention’, it’s about ’holding their interest’.
Does your site do that at the moment?
Are your users having to ’Click here to skip intro’?
Maybe it’s time to consider a change.