Take a little time to tweak your blogs, newsletters, websites, and other visual communication to see if your readers will keep reading!
Top of the fold
Think of your blog or newsletter as if it is a newspaper. Your most important content needs to be “above the fold.” If you are working on a newsletter also be careful that any folds do not fall across faces in a photo.
If you are working with a blog or website, NEVER purposely create a “vertical fold.” That is, don’t have content that forces your reader to scroll to read the far right of your site. In general, try to have at least your most important content appear on the screen before any scrolling. Scrolling is also preferred over paging. Be careful about sending your readers to other locations. They might not come back! So, decide carefully how to present a post with a lot of content. Would a series be better?
The F Pattern
Researchers have followed eye movements of readers and picked up a distinctive F pattern as their eyes move across a page. Read this article for more detail. The author of this post encourages you to:
- write the most important content in the first two paragraphs (that is, the two horizontal lines of the “F”)
- pack information into the first two words of the remaining paragraphs, subheadings, or bullet points as your reader scans down the stem of the “F”
Blogs and Websites
I thought you might appreciate a few tips based on these two articles about the importance of horizontal and vertical placement of content:
- Navigation needs to be on the left side and secondary information on the right. The eye will hit the most recent post first. This is why I prefer a three-column layout. (This blog is an example of this tip. I am moving “Pages” to the left sidebar after I have finished editing them.)
- Over 80% of readers’ viewing time was spent “above the fold”. If you need to keep writing below the fold, have interesting content and writing style to keep them reading “below the fold.” See “How to Write with Flair.”
- What about Hebrew or Arabic? The studies applied to most languages. They did not thoroughly study languages which do not read left to right.
Recommended: Also see “The Best SEO Page Layout” by Blog SEO
