Business Website Advice

So much to read, not enough time. That’s what drives me to cheat-read.

Skim, scan call it what you will. Cheat-read is what my 8th grade English teacher called it.  She’d test for picky little details just to see if we read the whole thing.

I think many of got that early lesson because most people feel like they’re the only onces who skim a page and hate to admit it. 

Guilt be gone. Research tells us we look for certain things that tell us to slow down… We all do it and it works! It’s is the way we read in this day of overload.  We scan until we find what we are looking for and then screech to a slower more thorough reading style.

Similar school daze knuckle slappers still win as we feel the guilt of reading quickly, skiming headlines, skimming headings,looking for bold and racing down bullet lists. 

Our eyes dart around the page, seeking keys to what we’re looking for…a keyword in a heading, in bold or in a list.  Ah, we found it. Feels good, relief almost. We slow down and read more carefully. 

“Yes, yes that’s how I read, how did she know?”  Studies of what our eyes look at on websites (eye maps) show we look at first words in sentences.  We just don’t bother reading to the end of a long sentence.  From when we first learned to read, we found the important clues in headings.

So I absolve you of any guilt clinging to you for being an online cheat-reader. We have to in order to survive this information age overload.  Besdies…we all do it.

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