When most people start with their own website for their business, they imagine their customers will spend a lot of time browsing every page and hanging on every word they have so very carefully written for their site. But this could not be farther from the truth.
Web browsing shows up some interesting human habits and quirks most of which could fall under one heading - impatience.
Human behaviour when surfing a website is like no other activity that we do day to day. For example, most people when they go shopping will spend quite along time in each shop they visit and take their time browsing. However, repeat the same exercise on the Internet and all of a sudden, they need to do eveything so quickly. If they have not found what they are looking for within seconds, they simply give up and move onto the next website.
Whilst this impatience might seem unusual, there are two properties of the Internet that make this a natural thing to do.
Therefore, it is a bad idea to put long introductions that take time to download because before it is finished, you have probably lost 50% of your visitors. But there is a rule that is even more important.
Each time a person clicks on a website whilst searching for something, they are already starting to lose patience. After one click, you have probably lost a few customers, after two clicks you will probably lose a large proportion of your customers and after three clicks, you have probably lost more than half.
So you need to work with your web designer and make sure that as much information as possible is on your home page to take people directly where they want to go without crowding out the page and making it too difficult to follow. If your site is large then you will probably have to make people click at least twice for some information but whatever you do, try and avoid making them click three times and never ever make them click more than 3 times. You can be sure to lose more than 90% of your customers if you do this.