You'll recognise this - about 60% of people visiting your site will only spend a few seconds on your home page and then leave. These "bounces" or "hit-and-runs" are caused by many factors but in general come down to one thing: the visitor thought your site was relevant to their need but when they saw it they believed it wasn't. Note the careful choice of words. They believed it wasn't. And in this truism you can start to see how you can improve things for your business.

Say you can decrease your bounce rate by 10%. That means that the number of visitors who go beyond your home page has risen by a quarter. It follows therefore that the number of visitors who are likely to express a strong interest in your products and services also rises proportionally. These are your sales leads.

Rule 1

So how do you reduce your bounce rate? Design, design, design. Divide your intended audience into categories and address their needs. First time visitor, knowledgeable expert, journalist, job

seeker: all of these need to be considered in the design. Keep it simple and put the important things where they can be seen. All obvious stuff but it is surprising how often these fundamentals are overlooked in the pursuit of graphical glory.

Test different designs to see which work best - particularly the home page.

Everyone's one's too busy

Messaging is so important. Nor only the tone but the quantity. It's what you might call Permission Prose. At the start of a website visit most people are not prepared to put in the time to read a lot. A home page might get 3 or 4 seconds of scanning by the visitor to determine whether it is relevant to them. As they become more interested they will invest more time and you can become more wordy. So keep the messaging very simple and direct on the home page and for each click as they drilldown you can put more in. It follows that it's better to have a large number of well structured hierarchical pages with low text volumes as opposed to copy-dense ones.