Your potential customers are coming to your website to buy from you. You have about 50 milliseconds to impress them.

Give them the right first impression and you’ll significantly increase your chances of getting the sale. Give them the wrong impression and you’ll be facing an uphill battle to win their business.

Don’t underestimate the time, skill and experience it takes to create the right first impression.

There are plenty of academic studies that downplay the importance of visual design and favour content and functionality over aesthetics. We would never argue that content and functionality aren’t critical, however if you overlook the visual design, you’ll do so at your peril.

The initial visual impression is a visceral “gut” level reaction to something. It gives us the immediate impression as to whether something is good or bad, and it is notoriously difficult to measure.

There is great article on Visual Decision Making by Patrick Lynch at alistapart.com, which gives a lot more information on the subject. We have put a link to it at the end of this post.

What first impression do you want to give?

• Expensive and exclusive
• Quality and value for money
• Traditional family values
• Contemporary and design led
• Stack them high, sell them cheap

Colours, use of photography and overall sense of design are all crucial to conveying these messages in a fraction of a second. We know from working with our clients and testing different approached the difference these visual elements make.

For clients that need to convey value for money, an overly designed site or piece of marketing material can perform much worse than more of a home-made approach.

For an exclusive, expensive brand a poor design will be a major obstacle.

Whatever the look and first impression, the site always needs to be easy to use.

Creating the right first impression and conveying the key messages in an easy to use package takes skill, experience and time. Don’t underestimate it.

Conveying your brand and values

These can be difficult to convey, but a great web designer will spend time understanding your values and making sure they are reflected in the design, however subtly that may be. Our brains have a huge capacity for processing information and even the subtlest elements will be processed at a subconscious level.

Selecting the right font, colour tone and image positioning can all be subtle methods of conveying your values and influencing your potential customers’ decision making process about you.

An inexperienced web designer will often miss or underestimate the more subtle aspects of a design.

At the end of the day a small percentage point in your website conversion rate can make a big difference to your bottom line.

The importance of colour

This is a subject in its own right, but here is a list with some of the basic messages colour can convey.

• BLACK: Mystery, secrecy, exclusivity and tradition
• BLUE: Power, calmness, success and trustworthiness
• BROWN: Earth and nature, simplicity and seriousness
• GREEN: Harmony, health, nature and money
• ORANGE: Affordability, fun, youth, creativity and celebration
• PURPLE: Fantasy, justice and royalty
• RED: Excitement, action, adventure, love and passion
• WHITE: Simplicity, cleanliness and innocence
• YELLOW: Cheerfulness, playfulness, curiosity and amusement

The choice of colour and even colour tones could be considered a trivial aspect of your design choice. However, more experienced designers understand the effect these choices have on the decision making process.

The importance of photography and imagery

The old adage that a picture speaks a 1000 words is true, our brains processing power for visual messages is huge.

Whilst Jakob Nielson discourages superfluous design elements, favouring function over form, he does state the importance of great product photography. Where products are being sold we’d agree this is essential.

What about where a service is being sold, product imagery doesn’t apply. Jakob Nielson would probably class the use of tone setting aesthetic photography in this context as an obstacle to user experience.

However, we’d argue that what you are selling is your approach and the people delivering it. Setting the right tone by using the right type and quality of photography or imagery will say a lot.

Every day your potential customers are getting more web and design savvy and their expectations are growing. Investing in the right imagery is critical.

Presentation of written content

Another visual aspect of a websites design that is high on Jakob Nielson’s usability essentials is the presentation of content.

Web readers scan pages, content needs to be short, well structured and easy to scan. Here are four simple things to remember when writing web copy

• Keep sentences short
• Use bullets
• Highlight important messages; and
• Make calls to action really obvious

A great web designer will understand how to present content online. They’ll be able to feedback on where content should be improved and help highlight key messages. They’ll also know how to make sure content is presented correctly in different browsers and at different text sizes.

Again this takes skill, experience and a dedicated approach to keeping up with best practice in a rapidly changing environment.

Just how important is it?

Don’t take our word for it. Just think about how you react to the world around you and make decisions. Whilst we are all different and will be more or less visually led it affects the vast majority of us.

The author Malcolm Gladwell has written a book “Blink” on the subject, inspired by how his life suddenly changed, when he grew his hair long. It’s not about web design, but it does illustrate the point on first impressions.

Believe it or not, it’s because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, “The Tipping Point,” you’ll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time–and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair.

Source: What is Blink about? – http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html

At LexisClick we take a holistic approach to web design. To us the right visual impression, use of imagery, usable functionality, content and approach to non visual users are all essential to a successful website design. Our team have a huge amount of experience in web design and online marketing. We love the challenge and rewards of helping our clients make the right first impression.

Find out more about our holistic approach to web design and online marketing

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Web Design colour, Design, usability