Success in the field of web design in Myrtle Beach, SC is all about feedback. Of course, there is the initial building of your website, which has to be founded on solid, proven principles, but after the website goes live, your website manager begins a process of constantly monitoring how visitors are interacting with your site. Based on data collected from those interactions over the course of days, weeks, and months, your website designer makes changes to the site to capitalize on what’s working and make adjustments to what’s not working as well. In an area that is already unbelievably competitive, new technologies just entering the marketplace promise to take things up a notch or two in the specific activity of website user feedback.
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Web Design in Myrtle Beach and Your Subconscious
Believe it or not, when you visit a website, your brain makes a lot of decisions that you are not even aware of on a conscious level. You decide what to focus your attention on, what to ignore, and even make “value judgments” about the quality of the website and whether it’s worth your spending more time on. How do we know that our brains are doing this? Through the fascinating science of tracking eye movements. A specialized piece of equipment can monitor the activity of a person’s eyes, recording what they do when the person sees a web page. This type of equipment can capture information that the person himself doesn’t even know consciously about his activity on the web page. For example, an individual may claim that he did not notice a certain button in the corner of the page, while the eye motion data indicates that the eyes moved to the button and then left it—implying that the brain subconsciously dismissed the button as irrelevant and not deserving of conscious attention.
More Accessible Technology
You may have seen a “heat map” of a web page, clearly showing the areas of the page that people spend the most time looking at. These heat maps are created using the data from eye monitoring equipment, and they tell professionals in web design in Myrtle Beach where they should be placing the most important elements on their pages for their visitors to see.
As you can imagine, this equipment has, in the past, been far too expensive for the average company providing web design in Myrtle Beach to use themselves. But the technology now appears to be quickly growing small and affordable enough for a much wider audience. We anticipate that it won’t be very long before even small-scale web design firms invest in and use eye motion equipment regularly to test their web pages and find out how they need to adjust them in order to reach visitors even more quickly and effectively.
In a field as competitive as web design in Myrtle Beach, even small advantages count for a lot. The ability to track eye movements and use the data to improve web page design may well be the next big thing for the industry, and that’s exciting because it promises to bring benefits for everyone. Not only will websites enjoy longer visitor stay times and more efficient interaction with visitors, but visitors will be happier to find the most important information on a website served to them in the most convenient, intuitive way possible.
What Can You Do Now?
Leading up to the expected common usage of eye motion tracking among professionals in web design in Myrtle Beach, you can still make plenty of improvements to your website using information that researchers have publicized about how human beings view, analyze, and interact with websites. A good web designer is aware of these discussions and knows the best spots on a web page for social media sharing buttons, calls to action, eye-catching headlines, video content, phone numbers/email addresses, and other crucial elements. In a time when researchers tell us that a visitor makes decisions about a website within a few seconds of opening it, you can’t leave anything to chance! Details matter, and it’s important that your expert in web design in Myrtle Beach, SC knows how to use those details to their best advantage.