How to Get People to Read Instead of Skim Your Website

Found this via digg. If it works for commercial sites it should work for libraries -- right?

BNET | How to Get People to Read Instead of Skim:

If you find it frustrating to carefully create content for your home page of your Website, only to find that no one reads it, then you might want to try a contrarian approach.

Put fewer words on your home page.

Eric Anderson writes in an article at B2B Marketing Trends:

Try this: Figure out what terms users are most likely to associate with your product/solution sets. Make those terms into hyperlinks in the dead center of your home page, with no extra content whatsoever (make sure those terms are also used in your site search metadata).

For the user, trigger words equal relevancy, period. They'll be prepared to do more than scan the content linked from those words, because they've largely accepted the value of that content before even seeing it.

Link each set of trigger words to a secondary page that contains a synopsis of the product/solution. Show its relationship to other solutions with a set of related links displayed beside the description.