I agree with you. I get tele-marketers phoning me regularly in the evening just as I am about to sit down to dinner. That annoys me far more than getting an email in my inbox.

But in New Zealand now we have a team of government officials employed full time to fight spam. This encourages people to make complaints. There are certain people who just like to complain because it makes them feel better to knock someone else down.

So for a small business owner trying to use email to market themselves, it makes it very difficult.

If that same company sent a copy of the same ad to a million email addresses they would be fined but they are free to show the ad to millions via a billboard. There is a lot of ambiguity in the advertising world and this makes advertising your small business a real challenge.

Those who can afford the billboards (or TV etc) are in a better position than the small business who has to rely on other, cheaper methods. I don’t call it spam, I call it using initiative and trying, in this very competitive world, to succeed. Is that really a crime? I think there are a lot of people with nothing better to do than complain. People who want to try and ruin my attempt to be successful.

Why not just delete the email if you don’t want it? Does it hurt you when I email you? Does it affect your life? No? So shut up complaining and just delete it, like I do.

This particular eye tracking study was done by Jakob Nielsen who recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of web pages. They found as a general rule, people scanned the page in an F-shaped pattern. But as you say, if there was something of great interest positioned in the bottom right corner, people’s eyes would eventually go to it.

It’s just that the first place people look on the page will be the top left corner, so it makes sense to put your most important element there, rather than at the bottom right where it will take them longer to see it.