{"id":4464,"date":"2013-07-23T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T13:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/?p=4464"},"modified":"2013-07-23T06:00:46","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T13:00:46","slug":"grabbing-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/23\/grabbing-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"grabbing attention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you read in two quick F-shaped scans?<\/a> That eyescan study says most of you do. It’s an important question if you’re trying to gain notice on the web – which, as a musician, I of course am. I have two lines, maybe one phrase each, to grab people passing by, before they’re done and out.<\/p>\n

Fancy formatting doesn’t help; you’ve learned to think that means ads<\/a>. Honestly, I think that’s positive adaption, even if it leads to amusing results like 86% of test subjects being unable find the US population on the US Census’s web page<\/a>, despite the fact that it was bright red and the largest text on the page.<\/p>\n

Almost everybody threw it away as an ad, because, frankly, it looks like one.<\/p>\n

Two months ago, I rebooted this website. I cleaned it up, simplified some pages, improved organisation, added post collections – lots of starch in the collar. Plays are up, hits are up, revisits are up – all those good things.<\/p>\n

But I have enough data now to see that there are two<\/em> audiences here. You? You’re one of them. You pop in, read an article, and you’re done – particularly if reading on an echo. Some<\/em> of you use the players on the left; some of you read more posts. A small but cool percentage of you browse collected articles. That’s awesome. Go you!<\/p>\n

The other audience will never see this post<\/em>. They’re like dark matter; there, and massive, but invisible.<\/p>\n

In two months, hundreds of people have visited the front page of this website. They play music – primary reboot goal attained!<\/em> – they look at videos, glance at reviews and press pages, and once in a while hit the contact form. They explore more<\/em> pages per visit than you do.<\/p>\n

And they never<\/em> come over here. Ever. Unless Google is lying to me, not once<\/em> in two months has even one of these visitors clicked on “Blog of Evil” in the navigation bar. Not even once.<\/p>\n

It’s an astounding result, really. I’d like to get them over here, too; get them engaged.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how, yet. I’ve made one small change to the front page of the site, tonight – I’ve changed ‘Latest Schemes from the Blog of Evil’ to read ‘This News Just In from Supervillain Central,’ and linked it to the blog front page. Given the special-text-gets-ignored result in the second study above, I’ve also dimmed it from bright yellow to slightly-less-bright and slightly-more-greenish yellow, to blend in a little more. It’ll take a while to collect enough data to know whether it matters, but the theory is sound.<\/p>\n

Maybe I need to change it to “news” or something boring like that. Gods, I hope not. (eta:<\/b> After some feedback on Livejournal, I realised that whether I like it or not, people weren’t hitting the Blog of Evil link. Let’s try “Blog.” Also “Home” instead of “Story.” I mean, one of the bullet points in the article is Clever phrasing drives away clicks<\/em>, just as effectively as ad-like text.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, if you’re in this audience, if you’re here off a search, or a trackback, or you’re just new, I’d like to get you engaged in the other direction.<\/p>\n

In some ways, you’re a bigger challenge. Most new posts are read on echos – Tumblr, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, via RSS, and so on. But collections and semi-viral articles like Power and Supervillainy<\/a> have large numbers of readers on the band site itself. Those people – you<\/em> – you’re difficult to keep. And while I’m thrilled you – whoever you might be, reading this, in the future – you like my writing enough to get down this far… my art is the music<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That’s<\/em> the goal.<\/p>\n

i know what it means
to work hard on machines
it’s a labour of love
so please don’t ask me why<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you read in two quick F-shaped scans? That eyescan study says most of you do. It’s an important question if you’re trying to gain notice on the web – which, as a musician, I of course am. I have two lines, maybe one phrase each, to grab people passing by, before they’re done and [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-of-indie-music","category-diy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}