I have preached in the past that marketers with common sense would stick some important links on the right-hand side of Web pages because people read English left-to-right and most people click using their right hand.
It seemed like a "duh."
Then I learned that a usability lab in NYC has repeatedly tested this for loads of prominent sites, and found consumers ignore the right-hand column almost completely because it's a spot that so often contains advertising.
It seems that Web surfers' eyes have been trained to stop looking at all places on pages that routinely carry advertising, even if the site they are on is ad-free.
Whoa.
Last weekend our Web designer Ryan took time out from his heavy barbeque schedule to begin switching all the links on MarketingSherpa sites from the right side to the left side.
Now we'll begin to track to see if it makes a difference or not in clicks and conversions.
In the meantime, I'm wondering does this rule apply for HTML email newsletter design too? If you know, contact me.
