Video Series: Why Visuals Matter Online

A website with all text is boring and can turn away potential customers. In this video, our web consultant, Brent Haeseker, shows why it is important to utilize images and concise text in order to maximize the impact of your site.

 

Full Transcription:

Brent Haeseker: Hi I’m Brent Haeseker, and I am going to show you why visuals matter. This is going to be a short little video but I think it will be very helpful to you. I’m going to show you a few things that I want to get your feedback on. See what you think on it. And I purposely am in this room here in our office with a nondescript colored wall behind me. It is just kind of a beige wall trying to get a very neutral background. Of course I made the mistake of wearing a bright orange shirt today. I shouldn’t have done that. Pretend like I’m wearing like a gray shirt or something like that because I want what I show you, the visuals to be what stands out and gets your attention. OK, so just pretend like I’m not wearing an orange shirt, I’m wearing a gray shirt. And actually I’ll put the image over my shirt as best I can. So you can just focus just on the image. OK. Now tell me what you think when you see this image. Does it have any interest to you? What do you see there when you look at that. See a lot of text right? Is there anything there that stands out to you? Anything that you think “hey I really am interested in what he’s holding up.” Probably not. You’re probably looking at this and thinking it’s just a bunch of words. I really don’t care. Some of you might be able to read that if you’ve got the video large enough on your screen.

So that was the first image, are you ready for the second one. Here we go. So what do you think about this one? A little shorter, a little bit more concise. And believe it or not, it’s the exact same information that was on this one. It’s just been condensed. We took out a lot of the filler information and weeded it down organize it into bullet lists and bolded some of the text so it stands out a little bit more. As you’re starting to see now, this looks like OK it’s a puppy for sale, some information on this particular puppy. Still not as interesting, but at least it’s a little easier to get all that information in than that last image I showed you. So now let’s look at this particular image and tell me what you think of this one. Ok are you ready? Already I can hear the collective awe out there on the Internet as everyone’s looking at this cute little puppy on this page here. Now suddenly it’s a little bit more interesting. Right? Because you’ve got this cute little puppy here. There we go. This cute little puppy right here. Now it’s the exact same information I showed you on the last piece of paper right here. But all I did was added in a puppy. Actually I made some of the bullet points, No actually it’s the same thing.

It’s the same thing. I did condense the bullet points just a tad on this one too so that there’s more focused on the puppy so as you can see suddenly it’s a lot more interesting here so you’re thinking OK I’m interested this puppy for sale is pretty cute. Hey look a discounted price only five dollars. Hey all right. How can I get this puppy. So now let me show you one more image. See what you think of this one. Ah suddenly now it’s just like hey buy now. Let me get my wallet out. Cute puppy for sale. Only five dollars. Buy now. And information where you can you can pick up the puppy before you get out your wallet and get ready to buy and drive over to her office pick up this puppy. Obviously this is just a photo I snagged off the Internet. The Puppy doesn’t really exist here in our office. But as you can see, there are four different images and each one was a little different each one was a little bit more visually oriented. And so as you can see as the images went on each one was quicker. Your eye was able to focus in on it a lot better. So here’s the first image versus the last image. Both basically saying the same thing:Puppy for sale five dollars. Here’s the location where you can come get it. But one obviously gets your attention a whole lot more than the other one. So I’m doing this demonstration in order to basically show why images on your website are important. Why the layout of your website is important just as you know, even if we go back to the first two images which is just the bulleted text versus this text same information.

But this is a whole lot easier to read and it’s more condensed. So you want to make even your text you can make more visually interesting and easier for people to to read and to you know get the gist of what you’re trying to say because if you’re Web site is just text then nobody’s going to really care to read it. So you’re just fooling yourself if you think people are going to spend a lot of time reading it to make your site very visually oriented. It’ll be much more impactful, it’ll be much more successful. If you want any help on making your website more visually oriented, Please give me a call. Brent Haeseker at 1 800 7 0 9 3 2 4 0. I am a Web site consultant at Netsource Technologies in Ocala, Florida. Thanks for watching and I hope to see you again. God bless.