A web presence, it goes without saying these days, is a critical communication vehicle for just about anyone with a message, be it business government or personal perspective, if you want to be heard you have to be there.
We all understand the importance of inter personal communications, just some of us may not be as good at it as others, however when you are face to face you can recover from a faux pas and not totally destroy that relationship.
With a website, communications takes on a more challenging aspect as your website cannot react or even recognize that your visitor has a much different reaction to your presence than what you intended. Your visitor is engaged in a conversation with you through your website, and your response has to be anticipated to their real time interaction. Basically if the visitor doesn’t like what they see, and leave you won’t even know it.
So how do you know and even plan for this contingency in your design, and more importantly where do you start?
As with any inter personal relationship, it starts with a first impression. First impressions are interesting in that we can make one almost instantaneously and it affects how we interact with the person, either in a positive or negative fashion.
Websites are no different, studies have shown that first impressions are made with in the first 50 milliseconds of seeing a website for the first time.
So your first step is to determine what kind of first impression is your website having on your visitors.
We will explore this in future articles.
