Traceinspace.com exists to improve your website so that your customers stay longer and spend more time reading. This is achieved by understanding the subconscious effect of layout, logo, colours and graphics, thus helping you to build the right message into any website design.

  The primary idea is that there are fundamental principles surrounding the way that the human brain perceives space and symbols. Traceinspace.com explores several of the ones that make the biggest difference.

   If you’d like me to review your site in detail, then feel free to contact me directly by going to the Further Information section.

Why do some websites get more pageviews than others?

Why are some website images and layouts more successful than others?

  In the last few years we have been rediscovering many old-mind concepts that have been largely ignored. Ideas that may not have been popular in the past, such as gender differences, are being widely acknowledged and the popular press regularly carries articles about brain-states, insomnia, stress disorders or the way children are affected by advertising. These old-mind drivers also influence what happens to visitors as they land on websites, but at present, there are very few people actively working in this field.

  The fact is that human beings have always lived and acted in space, in the sense that everything that happens to us occurs in the context of up, down, left and right. These fundamental concepts have deep-mind meanings to us because since pre-history, these four elements of space, dominated by the sun overhead, have always been there, unchanged. The result is that we are permanently oriented in the world by basic pre-historical factors, where the sun is always perceived as being upward, and darkness is always perceived as rising from the ground.
 

  In prehistoric times, right-handedness was the norm. Even as late as 1950 in Africa, left-handedness was still very rare. In the old mind, it’s the right hand that throws the spear. It cleaves the air and it kills the pig. This means food, and consequent survival. As the spear flies in a rightward direction, it must travel from the left, and so it leaves leftwardness behind. Mother, childhood and our origins lie spatially on the left. To the right is the direction we’re headed in life.

  There are many implications. The spear, which is hard, sharp and shaped like a wedge, cleaves through the air. This shape is the natural one for cutting, and when it appears in symbols, it’s stating the opposite to roundness and smoothness. There are old-mind expectations about all these concepts. They are perceived as part of the natural order of things. They have deep meaning in the mind (for a visual display of this, see Handwriting). These are some of the concepts that this website explores.

  In Traceinspace.com I invite you to consider that if spatial allocation affects our reactions to a lot of things – including websites – and if there are subliminal impacts in both text and symbols, then anyone running a website without knowing how to stop it from unintentionally triggering alarm in the mind of visitors runs the risk of putting them off in the first fifty milliseconds, without knowing how or why.

  Of course, if you do know the why and how, then you can actively achieve a far better outcome.