Stumble Upon taught me I judge a book by it’s cover
I spent about 30 – 45 minutes a couple nights ago stumbling accross the Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Weblogs and Video Games categories. I’ve never really used the website that much due to time constraints, but I actually ended up having a lot of fun. However, one thing I noticed is that after a while I realized something, when I stumble upon websites I was frequently deciding on whether or not to scroll down simply based on the look of the website. Is this a superficial way to view websites? Yes. Is this what forces some stumble upon visitors away from your website? Yes.
When I see a design that looks like it’s coming out of the late 90′s or just barely entering the new millenium I think to myself, “I don’t have a lot of time to invest finding new websites so I’m not going to bother looking at this one.” 
lol… Now granted, sometimes I’ll stick around to let the title try and convince me it’s worth reading but having a poor and/or outdated design makes me want to click the stumble button again to check out something else and I’m sure other people think the same leads to a higher bounce rate for stumblers in my opinion.
I know this is a short post, but I’d like to hear some feedback about how you use StumbleUpon:
As a webmaster or blogger, do you believe your poor website design leads to a higher bounce rate for Stumblers?
As a reader do you judge a book by it’s cover?
Let me know what you think and feel free to check out my stumble upon profile and add me to your friends list.
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Even I do that… but I make sure that I don’t stop at the cover but quickly browse through book pages too. In our case, scroll down and have a glance at content to get an idea of quality of the content. And that’s why I stumble often to your blog now a days
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I think it is a really common thing to do. of course the look of something straight away goes into your brain and connects with memories and ideas of what that style means to you, and we easily refuse stuff that doesn’t attract us. i suppose that’s my people spend so much time and energy on design.
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Like life, mostly everything is based on looks. Especially websites.
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I think it depends on what you’re looking for. I’ve run across some poorly laid out and very rudimentary sites through Stumble that have great content. But as a writer/editor I’m more interested in content than visuals, and I know there are a lot of people out there with great ideas and knowledge who don’t know or care the first thing about design. Sometimes those who are blogging simply because they’re deeply interested in a topic just don’t care about marketing themselves–and those can be gems. I agree, though, that the general tendency as people surf the web is to make decisions at a glance. It’s the general tendency everywhere, actually, it’s just easier to move on when you’re on the Internet.
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Yeah, I do it too. If the design or formatting is so bad that I can’t concentrate on the content, I move on within seconds. But then, maybe I have Adult ADD.
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I definitely do it to a degree. If it’s too light, too dark, line spacing or one looooong paragraph, having to scrrrrrrrrol past advertisements.
Etc. Those are the 4 that irk me the most.
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I certainly do it with stumble upon, I’m usually looking for something fun so something great but more of a read will get bookmarked rather than me looking at it there and then.
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I wrote about this a while back myself .
I think one of the problems is that people tend to put big, elaborate, logos, RSS buttons and the like at the top of the page. Your’s actually isn’t too bad. I’ve seen much, much worse. You only have a few seconds to gain the attention of an SU visitor so unless your logo is very visually compelling your content better snag them quickly.
One of the advantage I’ve seen with the magazine style themes is that you can have a different layout on the front page vs. the post pages. While you can do this with any WP theme you mostly see it on magazine style ones. You can go with the big honkin’ logo on your home page and use a more modest one on posts.
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I can’t remember the exact url but one of the blogger managed to increase his revenue 2 times as well as his bounce rate by simply making a professional looking header.
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I mainly use Stumble Upon to discover new websites within my areas of interest. I’ve gotten into the habit of spending at least 30 to 60 minutes a day just clicking on the Stumble Upon tool bar and seeing what pops up. I’ve come across a ton of very cool and interesting sites I never would have come across otherwise.
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That’s the reason probably I have chosen the current template. It’s so tempting to have that colorful template for travel website but it’s not that friendly for widgets… so I am little confused whether to take benefit of the cover or build a good book with quality papers.
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Yes, the traffic from StumbleUpon has relative high bounce because of this. We want good layout, graphics and terrific headline if not, thumbs down or Stumble! button.
Luis Mtz´s last [type] ..20 Simple Ways to Monetize Your Website
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