This reading is exactly what I had hoped and expected to learn in this Web Publishing class. In our careers, we may be asked to create a visually appealing website for a client. We are going to need to know many basic and fundamental organizational principles in order to start, such as: What is the eye drawn to? How should the website be organized? What colors should be used? Should there be pictures? The Gestalt Theory is easy to understand and truly does encompass many aspects of graphic web design.
What I found the most interesting to read was how the eyes view a website. I knew eye-tracking studies have been done but I never knew the conclusion. The F shape on a website makes perfect sense. After I read this, I went to popular websites to see if the F shape is utilized, and in most cases it is. Let’s use Facebook as an example. Once you’re logged in and on the Home (or Newsfeed) page, the top of the page has the most essential parts of the site (your own link page, the Home link page and a search bar). The left side bar is the second thing the eye is drawn to, and in this case the Facebook Home page lists in a proximate list of your Favorites, Groups, Apps, Pages and more. The last part of the F the eye is drawn to is the middle, where the news about your friends starts. It all makes sense.
Even though this reading told us way more information than just this F pattern, I personally think it is the most important of all. Of course you want your website to be usable and aesthetically pleasing, but you also want it to be organized for people to read in a certain way. From what I have read, I think this is the most fundamentally important part of web design.