I’ve mentioned a number of strategies for designing blogs and creating web content but perhaps this visual will really put it all into perspective.
The Gutenberg Rule is a simple rule that suggests that the top left is the most important part of your site (since in the west we read left to right and then top to bottom) and that we eventually end up on the bottom right.
The bottom left area of your blog page will get the least attention and if you’re going to have any call-to-action design, you should probably have something on the bottom right.
I recently changed this blog to have the action-button on the bottom right. Here, on ChurchCrunch, I have it on both… just in case. đŸ˜‰
Ron_Tuffin says
In the blog context does this apply jsut to posts, or to the whole theme design?
Jason Young says
the human mind is drawn to the right side naturally. if you watch people and there is option between left and right, most people bend to the right. watch a water fountains. watch when there are two screens. what when a left and right option are given and both are equally good. so, i agree with you on the right placement and your thinking on where we end up anyways after reading. i know disney world does a great job on psychographics. they strategically place things on the right side because they know how the mind operates. interesting.
human3rror says
disney does a freaking awesome job. those guys are masters.
kevincooper says
This is a good reminder…and a good rule of thumb. If you've ever seen the "heat" maps of where people's eyes look in Google search results, you'll see the same thing of a lot of attention in the upper-left.
human3rror says
yeah, i've done those heatmaps here… https://churchm.ag/2008/10/08/clickheat-heat…
human3rror says
everything.
Leo Wurschmidt says
I think UE is a very underutilized tool in many graphic designers' tool belts. Thanks for the great reminder to stay mindful on what the end-user is going to be doing during their visit to our websites.
Rob Webter says
Menu experiments have shown that the upper right is the place people look at first. Putting foods with the highest profit margin there have greatly increased profits at restaurants. The same works for the big signs over the counters at fast food places. Could it be that the “strong fallow area” is, in fact, more important than the “primary optical area”? Just wondering. I saw the heat maps you created, too, but unfortunately those track clicks, not where eyeballs go. I wonder if tracking eyes would yield a different result. Could it be that people click on the upper left because we follow the Gutenburg Rule and put our best links there? I’m not suggesting to know anything about anything here. Just raising the question.