Great Headers and their Importance
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
When you visit a new town where you haven’t been before, you no doubt notice the skyline first - sort of a “calling card” for the city, yes? And when you look at the newspaper, what do you notice first? The headline, of course. And think of your favorite TV show - I bet you’re thinking of the opening credits.
We all make judgements about items based on what we first saw or noticed about them. The same is true for websites. The first thing you see when you go to a website is the header of the page.
Whether or not your content is as good as your header, visitors will tend to stick around when they see a good header on your site - because they will make that leap of logic. This leads to your readers sticking around longer and looking at your content. This means more traffic, recommendations and even links to your site!
Your header does two things which are vital for your website. One is giving visitors an idea of what sort of content you have on your site. Secondly, it provides a measure of the quality of that content. A good header, at least in the minds of web surfers, equals quality content.
As you can see, the header does two very important things. Your visitors can get a quick idea of what kind of content your site offers, as well as giving a sort of gauge of the quality of your website overall.
A professional looking graphic header can work miracles for your websites traffic flow. Even if you don’t give it much thought once it’s up, your visitors will notice.
It is hard to underestimate the value of a well designed and well planned out graphic header. You may not even notice the effects of a good header on your website.
Keeping visitors coming back and staying on your site longer is something which you can ascribe to many factors: content, better search engine rankings, new features and the like. However, in many cases it is your header which is doing all of this work: out in the open, yet behind the scenes.
