Media: New Thinking Encourages New Actions

A successful page is one that calls people to act and move on, argues Gerry McGovern, challenging the 'sticky' content brigade.

In "Your website should encourage people to act", Gerry McGovern lists activities that might be usefully offered to website visitors to involve them in the site.

His is a sensible approach that sees action, not content per se, as the motivator for visitors to engage with a site, subtly refining the increasing desire for 'stickiness' to be found among clients who believe that the longer someone spends hanging around on site, the more likely they are to fulfil the client's goals. It is this crude version of 'sticky' thinking that opposes deep linking, and that has cut so far back on the ways out of a site (in a bid to keep visitors at one particular destination) that the meaning of hypertext is all but lost.

Anyway, Gerry is not of this school. 'Developing an action-oriented website begins with your homepage. A reader will leave your homepage for two reasons. Firstly, they realize they're in the wrong place. Secondly, they feel there is nothing of interest to them on the rest of the website,' he writes in New Thinking.

'Have a look at the Microsoft homepage. Practically every piece of text on the page is written with the objective of bringing you deeper into the website.'

This is not 'sticky' thinking, this is about energising.

Associated Link: New Thinking: Your website should encourage people to act

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