How attractive is your website design?

Judging website designs is, for most people merely a matter of opinions in most cases, so we thought we'd share this nice tool that can give a bit more objective feedback onyour designs. Enter Feng Gui, an eyetracking simulator.

Eyetracking is a technique for seeing where a user's eyes glance, and fix on different places during the first few seconds of looking at the page. Ithas been used widely in laying out retails stores in the past, now moved to website design and enough studies have now been done that the results are largely predictable.

We ran an image of our new homepage through the tool to see what it could tell us about users first impressions of the site.

Overall we're pretty pleased with it. Our aim was to let the content of each page really stand out, using a much darker overall template than our old site, and bringing in the colour and highlights of our clients site photography as the main focus.

We've managed to get the balance about right with a fair amount of skimming over each of the menus and our own strapline to see what we're all about. Other pages have a much stronger single focus like a headline or a contact form.

The tool is free for one use per day, give it a go on your site and let us know how you get on.