Where are your website hotspots?

Two recent reports released by web usability guru Jakob Neilsen have shed new light on just whereabouts on a website visitors look the most.

In one report Neilsen revealed that "Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold." The fold he refers to is the traditional direct marketing term for information above or below the fold in a letter or mailer. In web terms, he means information below the bottom of edge of your browser window.

In his other report, Neilsen confirms that: "Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable."

So in summary if you want to push one thing on your web page - a newsletter sign up, top products, enquiry form etc. - then you should put it on the top left hand section of your web page.

There's also a possible argument for creating short pages that within most browser windows without the need for scrolling, although I have also read a lot of material which says that sales oriented conversion or landing pages should be as long as possible - go figure!

Creating yet another mixed Twitter account

This is getting to be something of a habit - I've just been working on creating another new Twitter account for a client, in this case www.zencartwebdesign.co.uk who sell Zen Cart e-commerce add ons, hosting, installs etc.

I firstly created their new Twitter account at http://twitter.com/zencartwebsites then I found some third party RSS feeds from Zen Cart forums and sites. I plugged these into my account at http://twitterfeed.com which aggregates them and pushes the feeds to the Twitter account.

Then I went through the client's website and pulled out 30 odd products and articles, and wrote a tweet about each one, with a link of course. Then it was off to my account at https://www.socialoomph.com where I pasted each tweet in, pre sent to publish one a day for the next month (I noticed that if you pay to upgrade to the Pro, you can create a reservoir of tweets and have it publish one a day randomly).

So now we have a nice new Twitter account publishing numerous tweets daily all on its own, with each tweet  packed full of keywords so they'll appear in searches on twitter!

Now I just need to submit to some twitter directories and start following some e-commerce twitterers to get the ball rolling.

Are Ebay and Amazon underated as E-commerce sales channels?

I've just been having a catch up with a former client who's coming back for some more work, and our discussion has raised some interesting issues about the use of Ebay and Amazon.

Why Social Media Shouldn't Exist

I've just been reading about a one day seminar on The Future of Social Media, and it made me realise just how big a deal this sector of the internet has become. Just check out some of the 'big name' brands who'll be attending (and the price tag of course).

But then it got me thinking about the validity of Social Media - as a buzzword, a trend, niche, sector or topic. Is it possible to argue that Social Media or Social Networking as descriptions shouldn't even exist, because all our online activities should be social in one way or another?

Is it time to move beyond the Social Media catch all and start trying to integrate the pinricples of communication, interaction, dialogue, recommendation and opinion sharing into everyday websites?

For example, if the Boden website allows it's customers to post and share their own honest reviews (sometimes negative) of their produts, then surely the Boden site is social. Each review even includes details about the reviewer; gender, location, age, and frequency of purchase. It would be one simple step to enable Boden customers to actually find and engage directly with each other based on these criteria, on a social basis, or for users to see what else the reviewer bought or where they shopped just like the same principle of social bookmarking.

Maybe social recommendation by a site's users and customers will be the next evolution of Amazon's classic 'people who bought this also bought this....' sales tool, once that technique gets so overused it loses effectiveness (or users start to mistrust the recommendations of site owners).

It certainly makes a case for websites to start engaging users in a more active way, through the creation of user generated profiles integrated with internal transactional and buying behavoural data... think Facebook for ecommerce shops.