ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Recent research into the reading habits of the average Internet user reveals what we've all long suspected: those visitors to your site are not reading much. The lesson for smaller businesses is obvious: Tighten up that copy and remember to make those words that you put up there count.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen analyzed the data from a recent study on Web use and his conclusions, while not too surprising, are significant for smaller businesses.

Nielsen writes: "On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less. In the full dataset, the average page view contained 593 words. So, on average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page."

As David Utter writes on WebProNews: "Out of that hundred-plus words, you might be getting 50 across to the visitor. That's not just a short attention span, it's a veritable eyeblink."

Significantly, Nielsen notes that the study was designed to track typical users: "In the study, the authors instrumented 25 users' browsers and recorded extended information about everything they did as they went about their normal Web activities. What's important about this study is that it was completely naturalistic: the users didn't have to do anything special."

These are your customers, your clients, your users that they're talking about. Don't drown them in text that will have them clicking away faster than you can say lost sale. Make every word you put on your Web site count.

Nielsen's concluding advice is simple but apt: "If you target a broader audience or have sales cycles that are shorter than 5 years, you'd be wise to put your word count on a strict diet."

Or as Utter writes: "Save 'The Sound and the Fury' for your reading list, rather than your site copy. Visitors are coming for the facts, delivered in some tasty, effective "bytes."