Aug 19, 2008
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When designing a website you have to appeal to the eyes of a reader. You have to grab their attention in a relatively short amount of time. Here you can see what looks like an outline of a paper that you would write for an assignment. When you see this structure you will see the anchor points.
This layout is nice and cleanly organized to easily find information. As you can see there are what we call anchor points that will draw the eye: clients, web development, web design, web marketing, service areas, and forms. These are to the left with their sub-categories indented making the parent of the sub-categories stand out. These are anchor points that will draw the eye as a visitor comes to the site.
A visitor generally makes a decision if they are going to continue to stay on a website within 8 seconds. That is a very short time span that a website owner has to grab the visitors attention. By using anchor points it will also help navigate a user to what they would be most interested in.
The navigation of a site is like road signs. The more clear and concise they are the faster and easier it is for a user to navigate through the site and find the information they were browsing or looking for.
This type of navigation will also help the search engines as the layout is clear and the information is easy to find to the web crawler. The search engine optimization process will be much easier as well. With proper layout of a website, it will also ensure that the website can grow and not effect the structure.
Remember if your website does not grab the attention and help people within 8 seconds then it does not matter what content you have on your website or what products you offer if the visitor leaves.