Choice Insights

Does the design of your website grab your visitor’s attention?

You may not realize this, but in today’s fast-moving world of shifting attention spans you’ve got no more than 9 seconds to get someone’s attention.

If your home page, social media post, email, or landing page is not interesting to your audience in 9 seconds, then they’re gone, quickly moving on to something else, and chances are they won’t be back.

A lost opportunity for you … and for them.

To make your online platform interactive and engaging, your job is to design it to engage your audience in one or more online conversations that are important and interesting to them. It’s important to do this a few seconds after they “land” there.

These are conversations they are already having with themselves about problems, issues, or aspirations that concern them.  The first step in designing your online conversation is to ask yourself these questions:

1. Who are my...

Have you taken a look at your website lately? Is it working for you?

What i mean is: Does your website help to drive your business by identifying leads and nurturing the relationship with your leads to become your customers?

I have an exercise for you. Pull out a copy of your business card and compare it to your website content. If your website is just a more elaborate version of your business card then your website provides a way for the visitor to contact you instead of the other way around. If this is the case, then you may need to reconsider how your website is designed.

Business cards, and information brochure websites, are just passive information sources for your visitors, until you take positive action to engage someone to follow up with them directly in a purposeful conversation. To follow up with them, you need their contact information.

One thing that I've learned is that there is a difference between a website brochure and an online business platform. According to online...