Selfish surfers demand attention

Web users are getting more selfish – so says web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. This means that more users are quickly zeroing in on specific information on a website in order to complete a particular task and leave. The BBC online has an article summarizing Mr Nielsen’s report on web habit trends.

The bulk of web interaction is now governed by search engines. Apparently less than a quarter of users now access the specific information they want through websites’ homepages. This means that most of your real prospects are arriving through a deep link that takes them straight to a destination deep inside your site.

Are you paying enough attention these critical “below the surface” areas of your website? Are they geared to converting these “tunnel-vison” prospects into actual customers in the little time that the typical surfer will spare you?

Most small businesses still focus their efforts to driving traffic to generic, crowded homepages. As the above results point out, this is not a viable long-term strategy as web users are becoming increasingly intolerant of websites that waste their time.