In this edition of Web Enlightenment we'll be talking about page design and how people read - an important thing to know about.

For those of you with particularly sharp calendars you may have noticed that this issue is arriving on an "off" week - I'm shuffling my publication schedule with this issue. The changed dates mean I won't be publishing on holidays and other inconvenient times for the rest of this year.

This newsletter focuses on giving you practical, interesting insights into how to successfully use technology as a tool to improve the way you do business. Bridging the gap between knowledge and understanding that all entrepreneurs have will help you make money online.

Please hit reply and tell me about what you'll be doing this summer. I answer every email sent to me.

All the best,

Shuffle to the Left

As you probably know people visiting your web site look at the top half of a page first, lots of Internet Entrepreneurs focus on putting stuff "above the fold" for that reason. Many sites, especially large e-commerce outfits, use "tab-top" navigation (similar to the way a paper file drawer is laid out) and that works very well.

Recently I've noticed lots of sites making errors in the other direction, they are incorrectly focused in terms of the horizontal dimension.

A recent study by Jakob Nielsen concluded that users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half.

That makes perfect sense to me as people read from left to right and they expect navigation buttons to be placed on the left hand side of a page. The "left center" portion is where the main content should go, and the less important stuff can go off to the right.

The mistake that many people make is to place important content all the way to the right in a column - this area is seen as secondary by your site visitors.

To really understand how much this is driven by the way we read we can take a look at a site designed for a right to left language, like Arabic.

The United Arab Emirates newspaper al-Ittihad is a good example - you'll notice that the entire site looks like a mirror image of what you'd expect. If you can read Arabic I apologize, for those of us that can't It makes it pretty easy to focus on the design when you can't read the words.

You'll see that the logo is in the upper right hand corner, the tab top navigation is right justified, and the wrap around navigation for PDF content is on the right hand side.

Down the left hand side we see the search box and a variety of other "secondary" type content - if you use Internet Explorer you'll even see that the scroll bar (normally on the right) is on the left hand side for this site.

Take a look at your own site with this in mind - are things organized from top to bottom and from left to right in order of importance? Do you have content that is not secondary in a secondary area like the far right "column"? Does your site maybe look like a "mirror" of the way it should be organized, like it was in Arabic?

If so, go ahead and shuffle to the left to make your site more usable for visitors. Your conversion rate will thank you for making the change.

Sunshine Acres Farm Report

A big thank you to everyone who sent me kind wishes on my new farm. I am very excited about everything here on the homestead and I am having fun.

Recently I have been seeing oodles of wild turkeys in the yard - at one point I counted thirty turkeys all in a big group. I know that some folks aren't big fans of these birds (they were introduced here in Maine subsequent to extirpation of wild birds in the early 1800's) but I like them. I must admit I am not excited about the stout fence that will be required for the veggie garden but I suppose that is a good thing to have anyway.

Speaking of veggies, my seeds are all started and in trays - my thanks to the good folks at Johnny's Selected Seeds. My entire 2010 garden came from them, in future issues of this newsletter you'll get updates on how all the little plants are doing.