First Impressions

As soon as your audience views your business, online or otherwise, you have seconds to portray your brand and your message clearly creating a positive impression. A complicated or outdated looking website will create a negative impression which will then lead the viewer away from your brand and website, and over to your competitors.

How they interact with your website for the first time sets the tone for how they perceive your brand in the future. With first impressions being hard to change, getting it right first time is essential.

Good first impressions will encourage viewers to stay on the website allowing you to expand upon their initial impression, further enhancing their opinions.

Your company visual branding plays a big part in this as well including established fonts, colours and imagery that compliments your brand values and messages. Colours have a huge impact on consumer behaviour due to each colour having a phycological meaning. Blue for example is trustworthy and calming, whereas green is natural and healthy. You can use them to create feelings amongst your audience to greatly improve your first impression.

Trust

If you see a website designed in Comic Sans, with garishly uncomplimentary colours and complicated navigation, you immediately feel hesitant as to whether this is a trustworthy and reliable business. Poor design installs anxiety in the viewer, and when given the choice to leave your site and go to a competitor which is well designed, you will lose your advantage.

A professionally designed and well laid out website will win hands down every time when it comes to trust. You need to provide comfort to the viewer that they are in safe hands, and that you are trustworthy and excel within your industry. A good design is enough to start this emotion in the visitor before any words or content is even read.

Consistency 

This strips your brand right back to its creation. For example, your logo will have brand colours and fonts, which make it recognisable to people that already know it. If you don’t maintain the use of these in all your marketing collateral, you become almost two different companies to your viewer. So not only is it important that your website is created consistently to your brand, it’s crucial to ensure the whole website follows a consistent layout. For example, using the same fonts throughout or headings always designed in the same colour, size and font weight. This keeps the whole website “on brand”, which builds the audiences recognition and gets them more familiar with your business.

Competitors

Possibly the biggest reason to ensure your website is designed well, is that your biggest competition will already be doing it. To remain competitive with them, you need to be on the same playing field as them.

Whilst you want to have a website designed well, and visually as engaging as your competition, it’s important you stand out from the crowd and address the issues of your audience with clarity.

Think about the niche of your business. Whilst you may offer the same services or prices, do you add something extra that they don’t? Do you deal personally with clients, or are you just a person behind a computer? Do you offer something bespoke to your client, or just standard services or products? Capture their attention then tell them what’s in it for them.

This niche, your point of difference, should shine through your website, it could be the final decision the audience makes between choosing you or your competition. It should showcase what is unique about you, and why they should choose you over anyone else.

In summary

Putting your best face to the online world is very imperative for you to achieve your business goals, and for future growth. From just these four small bits of information, when you view websites now, you’ll understand more about the process your brain is making in a faction of a second. You will see how quickly you make judgements and this will allow you to view your website in the same way your audience will. By helping them navigate the website easily you give them a positive experience which nurtures your audience and leads to more conversions.