There is a very old saying that states “you never get a second chance to make a good first impression”.  Now this is true both in the offline world and in the online world but to different extents.  Online, the first impression a customer will have of you is your website and if they don’t like it… well you won’t get the customer and you won’t get a second chance.  So let’s look at what you need to know.

Seven Seconds

This is the amount of time that you have to encourage a customer to stay on your website.  If it takes forever to load, if it looks a mess or if your home page is full of bad spelling and grammar, they won’t stick around.  If this happens, you can almost guarantee that your customer will return to the search engines and continue their search, and they may just end up with your competitor.

A Fast Loading Website is Imperative

Internet users often don’t have the time of the patience to sit around for a website to load and most will click the back button pretty fast if your website is full of flash graphics or Java which take forever to load.  Sure it might look pretty but the slower your page loads, the higher you will find your bounce rate to be.  Leave the big pictures off your homepage too!

Reduce the Photo Size

We just mentioned the importance of leaving big photos off your homepage but this doesn’t mean you have to leave photos out altogether.  Digital cameras these days purposely take photos in high detail so that you can do with them as you wish once you have taken them.  However, before uploading these photos onto a website you should take the time to shrink them before uploading.  If you can get the picture down to around 50k your website viewers can still see your pics and your site will load fast.

KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)

When designing your site you should do so with the KISS principle in mind.  A nice, cleanly designed website is proven to be a hit with the majority of customers so leave out the bright flashing lights, the potent advertisements and the music unless you are 100% sure that your customers like this sort of thing – trust us, most customers don’t.  Stick to a simple layout to avoid annoying people and you are on the way to success.

Professional Content

Finally, the last thing that you want to make sure you have on your website is professional content.  Now we don’t mean you have to write in a specific manner as this will depend on who your readers and potential customers are, but it does mean that you need to ensure the spelling and grammar on your website is correct.  Poorly written content is a huge turn off and won’t win you any customers.  If you struggle in this area, ask a friend to help you out or hire an editor to read over everything you write first.

Good first impressions online are vital to securing potential customers, and as you can see from the above points, it’s not hard to get things right.