The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack project tells us that when people look at news websites, “The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right.” The project also collected information about effective headline attributes, readability vs. scanability, web navigation, text vs. multimedia, etc. Read more highlights from this study at http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm.
Project home page: http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/index.htm