The average person gets distracted in 8 seconds. This means that we don’t have much time in which to tell you about the growing power, and ultimately increasing value, of visual content on your website. If we haven’t lost you already, that is.

It also means that the short attention spans of your customers or clients might stop them from absorbing your information. The way in which users consume content is more visual and the 8 second attention span, coupled with the fact that we’re all merely glancing at things whilst on the go now anyway, doesn’t bode well. The fastest growing social media platforms are the most visual and instantly gratifying ones – instagram, pinterest, snapchat and tumblr. So, if you want to ensure you get your point across you might have to find a different way of doing it.

Still with us?

In that case we’ve got another statistic for you; 81% of people skim content online. 81%! They’re not even paying proper attention to the lovely copy that you put all that time and effort into generating. This means readers are missing important parts of your message, and therefore potentially the whole point of what you’re saying. Logically, the fastest way to get around this is obviously to use imagery (or infographics) to convey a message, instead of blocks of text. It’s a cliché but when people say a picture is worth a thousand words it’s because it’s largely true. Visuals help you process and retain more information in less time, meaning that at an 8-second-glance a picture can tell you what the rest of the page is likely to be about.

Not to mention the fact that visual content enhances the overall design of your site. But this will only work if those images are great. Imagery needs to be big and beautiful so it’s extra important that you’re using appealing, hi-res shots. As many pixels as possible.The rate of people bouncing off your site increases if you’re featuring tiny, poor quality pictures, or paragraph after long paragraph of text, and you might have great written content but sadly people won’t be using their 8 seconds of interest to read it if they’re put off by bad images.

If your site could do with a rethink visually, please get in touch. We work with some great photographers, videographers and animators and would love to hear from you.