How many seconds does your website have to capture user attention?

The real question to ask's oneself is why even bother attempting to 'capture' users. The real users you should be pursuing are the ones that are seeking the solution your site/product/$gadget offers and those are the ones willing to put in the time to resolve it. I want a loyal clientbase, not those ready to abandon their attention & my service at the next corner.

I'm not entirely against capturing as many users as feasible, but having 'been around the block', I'm of the understanding that they're the sort that'll inevitably abandon your service either way leaving you with a vapid userbase that's a distraction from your core users/clients. Quality > quantity applies. I too admit that if I can net 100x the amount of users inevitably a larger % might stick around, vs. netting 1/10th the userbase and still losing roughly the same amount to attrition.

Note: I didn't actually read the article as the site didn't capture my attention.

For some reason, I only read the first few sentences.

Something they didn't touch one (surprisingly!) is the F-pattern of eye movement: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web...

In summary, research shows that the eye follows an F-shape on your website, and that's the sort of thing you should optimize for if you want to grab eyeballs quickly.

One. If you don't deliver some valuable content in one second. it's faster for the user to click back and click the next search result.