Ian Applegate..

When it comes to capturing a users’ attention upon landing on a website, imagery is very important. Of course, we all know this. However, when looking for rental properties in London, which is a very smothered market, it is surprising how many flats & houses advertised don’t have any pictures. For me, that is a surefire way to make me move on to the next property in the list.

It came to light last week that we had to move at the last minute. The schools we wanted for my daughter are slightly too far away for us to be in the catchment area. In order to help our landlady find new tenants, I built a website – www.brixtonflat.com – and posted on Gumtree, Spareroom and various other sites. I ensured that we had as many images as physically possible.

The response has been astounding and the amount of people commenting on how nice it was to have lots of images was interesting. In order to test my theory I used Crazy Egg to capture visitor statistics and in particular their clicking activity.

As you can see, the photos proved very popular and pretty much everyone clicked on every picture. When taking in to account the full webpage, it becomes even more obvious that people want images, images, images!