However, as the METRICS suggest, http://boingboing.net/grid is the “most liked” version/layout.
I wonder if it’s a “visual person” thing vs “text person” thing. And the internet is just slowly heading toward the former for various reasons, some obvious (early adopters are textfolk, but most people are visual) and some not so (visual layouts trigger more measurable interactions)
Do you know if it only increases the click-through rate or does it also improve the time users staying on the site?
Yes!
I do the bulk of my browsing via Safari iOS & the post format works better (for me) than blog in that format.
Though, yes, ASCII is tops.
My (completely uneducated) guess is that designers (I am not one) have decided that having an image related to a post, even an unrelated or barely-related image, improves click through on other articles on the site as well (as opposed to just a block of text links).
Even though I am a digital media artist (of sorts), and love graphics, animations, videos - I am still very much a mainly text person.
My “problem” is that I use the internet as a communications medium. I consider most graphics to be aesthetic ornamentation, which only gets in the way of the text. I’d rather go to a separate site of all graphics, so I can read without clutter.
Considering the clip art as part of the communications gets frustrating quickly, because it tends to be irrelevant or distracting from the text. Then again, I get so annoyed at brochures as to call banks to ask them who the models in the photos are supposed to represent (somehow, nobody ever knows).
I think layout and design are great areas to focus on, but most efforts on the web are lacking. Instead of great graphic design, most of what I find is about as artful as the average billboard.
Screens get bigger and bigger, yet people keep offering less and less text to fill it. Why the hell do I have such a wide monitor, if I am only going to get a four-inch “landing strip” of text down the middle of it?
Social media is a misnomer. I don’t care what people “like”. Come back and let me know when it has taken on the roles of government.
Or - you know - most adults don’t need a picture for every god damn thing.
Use typography, maybe.
You have a wide monitor so you can see the giant photo that’s at the top of the centered strip of text on a white background on every site.
Some people apparently believe this to be true.
Then why do they improve clickthrough rates?
I blame kids these days.
One thing I’ve hated about british news sources is that the one’s I’ve read (new scientist, guardian) seem to use an awful lot of stock photography.
I think I did one yesterday.
Right?
Because they don’t want you to read with it, you’re supposed to be watching audio/video commercials. They’re more effective than print ads and harder to ignore or block.
We actually had higher-res monitors before the HD de-evolution. 1280x960 was common before 720p HD and even the cheap ones were 1024x768. HD widescreens were a downgrade so that ads from TV and movies could fit every device.
It’s lousy for reading. Make a document flow full-width and it becomes unreadable. Zoom it in enough to fill most of the screen and you can only see a few lines. Zoom it out and most of the screen’s empty but you still can’t fit a full page on the screen. (What to do with the rest of the screen width? Fill it with ads!)
A pivotable external monitor that can be set to vertical mode is nice.
Stock photos are idiotic as a rule. I don’t understand why every blog (including this one) feels the need to include almost-related stock photos in articles. They’re useless, annoying, and now apparently sexist too.
It was good enough for USENET. >.<
We don’t need pictures but we respond to them. Compare a really old newspaper front page without pictures to a modern one:
Which is more interesting to the casual browser? Human beings respond to images, generally; the visual cortex takes up a huge proportion of our grey matter. It’s kind of weird to argue that we should be, what, ashamed of that? Or that in the competitive marketplace of attention on the internet that bloggers and site editors shouldn’t try to leverage our visual responsiveness?
