What makes people click?

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iWeb Maui

As mentioned in the last post, I recently published a site for our trip to Maui. The site consists of 7 pages. When looking at how many times each page has been visited, the numbers are kind of surprising to me. These are the numbers (visits) for each page (at the time of writing this):

Home: 211
Napili Bay: 65
Bike Haleakala: 63
Old Lahaina Luau: 62
The Road to Hana: 52
Photos: 173
Movie: 92

The links to the individual pages are clearly laid out at the top of the pages, yet it’s clear that all but the home page, and the photos page are being passed over by most people. Why is that? Do people not see them? Are people not interested?

As a web designer this is especially interesting to me. What makes people click? Given that this site has not (as of yet) been picked up by any search engines… and the only people visiting it are people that I have referred (either directly, or through my blog posts), you would think that most of the pages would be visited at a somewhat equal rate. But, that’s not the case… some people don’t even make it past the home page. I find that a little odd.

Links: The Maui ’06 Site

11 thoughts on “What makes people click?”

  1. That is kind of strange to think about….it’s probably because they just want to see the pictures and dont assume there are some on other pages.

  3. jakej720 – interesting… I wouldn’t call the other pages, ‘photo pages’. They were descriptions of our vacation. But, most people never realize that, because they never see the pages.

  4. Lol…that’s great. I can’t wait to go away on vacation next month. I’m going to El Salvador, a small country down in Central America.

  5. A few possible reasons:

    1. The links with images next to them (photos and movie) got more clicks than the ones that didn’t. Perhaps people respond better to images than words, especially words they don’t understand right away. Maybe you could experiment by having the other links with pictures next to them, and see if you get more clicks to the other pages that way.

    2. I tend to look at things in the upper left hand corner first, so I would see those links first, and maybe click on them without looking at the others, if they seemed interesting.

    3. On my screen, I could see both photos links, both the one on the top and the one with the image next to it. I tend to think that pages with multiple links from the home page are the ones that are the most popular.

    Where did you fly from? I don’t think of the flight to Maui as very long.

  7. We flew from here (San Francisco). I think it was about 5 hours to Honolulu, and then a second plane to Maui (about 45 minutes). All-in-all, a long day of travel.

  8. Diego, I am assuming you mean you found this site (one digital life) via the Google search, not the Maui site… correct?

  9. I don’t even remember how I came about this site. You say most people are either reffered by you or somehting esle… I definately wasn’t reffered by you, so im not really sure as to how I got here, but I have to say that I love your site!! I come on like everyday!

  10. Thanks Ryan, glad you like my site. Actually though, I was referring to the Maui site, not this site, that should only have traffic referred by me.

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