Website Heat Maps - A Simple Guide

Website heat maps are very useful in determining the content, architecture and usability of the website. They offer a good graphical representation of how your website functions. Visibility, usability and search engine rankings are among the features that websites need to improve. Understanding these concepts is crucial for a successful website. Website heatmaps are visual summaries of web pages that can be analyzed easily and that can provide you with important insights about site performance.  

In this website, I am going to show you the basic concepts of website heatmaps. The first step is to understand the concept behind a heat map. As mentioned, a heat map presents a graphical image of a webpage as a function of its various components. These components include text, background colors, image selections, map shapes, icon selections, styles and other page elements. The main goal of a heat map is to provide an easy overview and understandability of how different components interact with each other.

Let's take an example to understand better the concept of website heatmaps. Assume you are using Google webmaster tools in order to monitor the popularity of your website. You will be able to get a web page ranking report. One of the graphical outputs of this report will be the website heatmap. The heat map indicates the Page Rank, also known as PR.

As you can notice, PR is a very important aspect of a website. That is why Google provides several different heat map outputs. You can see how different elements of a page rank contribute to the overall page rank. The more colors, the higher the page rank.
To make things more interesting, here is another example. Imagine you are running an online store and your website visitor is able to browse through your entire inventory. He is then able to choose what he wants to buy. But what if that item is out of stock? If your website has a heat map displaying the items in stock, then it would be easier for you to adjust your inventory levels and increase the sales. You can get these services at https://decibel.com/resources/ultimate-guides/website-heatmaps-latest-enterprise-features/.

All of the above examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to website heatmaps. There are many more sophisticated ways to visualize the data. But for now, you get the idea. Heat maps have always been a fundamental part of web design and they are not going anywhere. Learn more today!  Knowledge is power and so you would like to top up what you have learned in this article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_data_visualization.