Web design

When planning and improving a website, it is important to know how people view websites. Knowing this will help you to design your site in such a way, that people will be able to find and do what they want on your website.

How to describe visitor behaviour?

Before changing the site layout, it is important to understand the nature of human behaviour on the website. It helps that certain known patterns apply to human behaviour, such as:

• people hunt for information, using words as clues
• people follow a funnel to conversion

Some are not aware that there's a h1 tag. Some use is as they please. Others try to think what makes the most sense and act accordingly.

Let's see what is the best way to use the h1 heading tag on your website to appease both the humans and the search engines.

How is it supposed to be used?

Judging by the HTML 4.01 Strict specification:
A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section* it introduces.
*- bolding mine.

Back in the days, to get into the search engines you only had to submit a site to them and it'd show up in the results (or you could just get listed in the Yahoo directory). Nowadays, doing that doesn't warrant anything and you have to work hard to be visible from the search engines.

Is it only the search engine algorithms that have affected the amount of energy one needs to invest in a website, or there are other factors at work? Let's see.

Nowadays, it seems that every site owners knows how his site should look like: visually appealing, with a large amount of graphics (or even Flash) and, of course, with plenty of images of people, preferrably women, preferrably barely clothed (or naked).

But reality is that what works isn't what people, who barely know anything about web design, think to work.