I’ve had a bit of a change around on the blog today. Today, I went to Blogcamp in London , the brainchild of Sally Whittle, which was sponsored by Talk Talk. It was a brilliant day. To me a course is good if I come away learning at least one thing and I have to say I learned something from each and every one of the speakers. Over the next few days I’m going to filter through some of the things that I’ve learned.
Dafydd Prichard from Cite, introduced the concept of the F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content. Studies have proven that there is a certain pattern that people’s eyes make when scanning a webpage which resembles the letter F. They scan horizontally twice and then scan down the left hand side. The reason I found this so interesting is that the design of the majority of blogs that I read, including my own are contradictory to this. So, many of us have our side bars down the right hand side. So in essence, people may be missing important content, including navigation on our blogs.
Luckily, I use the thesis theme for wordpress which makes it dead easy to switch them around.
Thank you Dafydd for this little gem.
I wasn’t at BlogCamp but read about this on the Twitter feed – I changed mine this afternoon too. It was easy on blogger too. Had never thought about it before.
It’s one of those ‘duh’ moments…so obvious as soon as he said it but had never thought of it.
I shall be mostly figuring out how to do this tomorrow ;-)
You know where I am if you need a hand. Always happy to help.
ooh, might try this on mine…..when Blogger decides to work again!!
Hope it’s up and running again soon.
I prefer the left side for links, but I thought that was because I’m left handed! thanks for this.
Now I just need to sort out the navigation at the top of my page…apparently it should be under the header image! :-)
I was told about the F-shape a few weeks ago when I asked the every-knowing twitterverse about blog layout. It’s an interesting concept and one that is obviously based on the fact that we read left to right as well as the scanning motion we make with our eyes.
The only issue I have with it is that if I’m reading the blog post (the whole purpose of a blog) then I forget to read the left hand sidebar (trained myself to blank that out now) and things in the right hand sidebar catch my eye.
But then I’m weird!!
Going to give a whirl for a couple weeks to see if it makes a difference. I can always change it back easy enough.
An other study that shows it is not always true:
http://www.miratech.com/blog/eye-tracking-comment-les-pages-web-sont-regardees.html
Very interesting article. Thanks for that.