When you know what your website visitors want, designing your site is so much easier. Ask yourself what they have they come for. To buy something, to search for information, to read articles, product support or to solve a problem. Consider google’s page design. It’s designed for one purpose only - to enter a word and search on it. You are not distracted by anything else.

Contrast this with the website bow wow books. What in the world are you suppose to do on this website? Or wordpress, which is so easy to understand, clearly laid out. You ‘get it’ instantly.

You can see the wordpress site is designed for scanning and for interaction. It has links to internal pages, which are logically grouped into new to wordpress, ready to begin and resources for pros. Simple and effective.

As a good example of websites made for scanning, digg lists the most popular stories by headline and excerpt. It’s easy to scan the home page allowing your attention to be captured by whatever interests you the most.

Some sites are made for reading. Blogs are generally designed for reading posts or articles on-screen. Search engine land is a good example of a simple two column layout optimised for reading articles on your screen.

If you have a lot of content you want your visitor to see and you want them to see it on your homepage, maybe to scan and select a topic of interest, then you need to understand eye tracking. Eye tracking is the study of how your visitors eyes dart around the webpage; which parts of the screen they look at first. Etre does eye tracking studies and describes the process with a video that’ll show what the topic is all about.

So, designing for users in not that difficult, as long as you know what they want when they visit your website.