Web design: What impression are you making?
When viewing a website, it takes users less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression, according to recent eye-tracking research conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Your website design is what makes a first impression. Before reading your tag line, viewing your video, or even reading your company name, site visitors have already formed a first impression of your business.
Web design is all about combining psychology, research, and art to craft a perfect site for your industry and demographic. Dark vs Light, Professional vs Fun, Feminine vs Masculine, Luxury vs Affordable. Your colors, layout, images, fonts, and word choices all influence the impression a visitor will have of your business.
Are you creating a good first impression? What about the right first impression?
5 ways to create the right impression with your website design:
Choose the right color palette.
Colors influence emotions
and perceptions. Dark colors are more serious, mysterious, or weighty. Light
colors are lighthearted, social, and clean. Bright colors encourage action,
fun, and excitement. Keep your color scheme limited to about 3 colors that are
complimentary to one another, and that send the message you want your visitors
to receive. Xtreme Shock (below) uses mainly a red color scheme with bright accents to encourage excitement and appeal to the young demographic.
Consider your fonts carefully.
Visitors look to the center
of the page first. The fonts on a page will affect the overall impression they
have of your business. Rounded fonts will appeal to feminine visitors, while reticulated fonts will make a site more masculine. Keep the font sizes proportional, and
don't have too many variations in size or font. The Loan Depot website below uses font to enhance the western theme to appeal to its primarily Texas demographic.
Image choice and placement matter.
Images are important, but
too many images can clutter a page and give the visitor anxiety. Images are
also less important than text: people tend to look at text more than images,
and more quickly. The most important images? Your logo, which people spend the
most time looking at, and social media icons. Also remember to include 'trust
symbols', or images that will encourage trust from your visitors (like the "As Seen In" trust symbols below for David Anderson Online).
Lots of white space is necessary.
It is important to make
sure your site has lots of space (white or not) between content. As I mentioned
above, too much content will keep a visitor from being able to orient
themselves, which might lead them to leave your site in
frustration. Keep your site as simple as possible to avoid overwhelming or
stressing your visitors.
Site loading speed will make or break you.
If your site
doesn't load in the first milliseconds, you've already lost the battle. With
millions of other web pages a user could visit, why would they wait to see
yours? Web users have very limited attention spans, so make sure your site is
optimized to load quickly. How? Use a good hosting company and have a
well-designed website.
If you don't think your site is giving the right first impression, ask us! We will do a website analysis that will look over your site's design, loading time, and other factors that influence first impressions.
