Are you losing customers before they see what you’re all about? We all know that first impressions are important and it’s particularly true on the Web.

Canadian psychologists discovered that brains take just a 20th of a second to make a decision about a website:

“Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors” - Dr. Lindgaard, lead researcher (taken from the book Brain Rules).

First impressions have lasting results. - psychologists call it the “halo effect”.  If people think a website looks good, this positive mental effect spreads to other areas, e.g. site content, and in turn reflects on the quality of the business itself.

You can probably see evidence of this in your own web browsing behaviour.  How many times have you dismissed a website in a matter of seconds, simply because you didn’t like the look of it?

If a website doesn’t look “right” and grab our attention, people simply move on to the next one. So getting it right matters.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Feature Articles, Marketing, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.