Poynter Institute has interesting new findings about how people read (browse?) Web pages of news organizations.

They tracked the eye movements of 46 people for one hour as they read mock news sites and real multimedia content. Most telling is that people’s eyes are drawn to text first (contrary to poplar wisdom about ‘image is everything’). Sites studied included such important news sites as USAToday.com, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, LATimes.com, Guardian.co.uk (even Phoenix’s AZCentral.com) and several others.

The usual suspects –subheads, short paragraphs, italics, bullets – still work, but it’s amazing how important design and layout is for Web pages. Small headlines and no hyperlinks got better read-throughs, for instance.

Check the study out if you are in content creation or design.