Read time: 3 minutes. In this small article:

1. The Issue

2. The Business implications

3. How can you change it

1. The Issue

This article explores the importance of design in the Internet world. A recent blog post on Signal vs Noise pointed out the article at Reuters which said that a website has around 1/20th of a second to make an impression that will stay with the user for the rest of their visit and all other visits.

You should take this on board. What impression does your website make on people? Have you ever asked your clients/customers what they think of your site? What was their first impressions of the site and why? Great content, functionality and added value are all huge aspects of Internet Development, but your site design can and will turn people away within a second or less. You need to address this issue.

2. The Business implications

The real business issue you need to consider here is your reputation. Your website is just like your receptionist: it can be the first thing that a client or user sees of your company. Can you afford to make a bad impression. Bad design is like having a rude receptionist.

You can lose customers and clients by having a badly designed website. That's the business issue.

3. How can you change it

So the next question is, how?

After having read this article it got me thinking about how you can solve this problem, anything people can do to make their first impression count.

Gitte Lindgaard, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa said:

"When we looked at the Web sites that we tested, there is really nothing there that tells us what leads to dislike or to like."

So, there are no principles that we can put here that can quickly change your sites design to make a better impression. The only advice I can give is to hire a professional design agency. Whilst this is still no guarantee of a design that makes a great impression, it is what they are hired to do: they are the experts.

However there are some basic principles of design though that aid a good site design (though as we already know, they don't MAKE a great design):

* No unnecessary animated GIFs like 'under construction' logos for pages

* No blinking text

* No background music

* No clashing colours or text on colours where the constrast that results is so bad that the text is unreadable.

* Use of appropriate, readable fonts. For instance Arial or Verdana. Text should not be too small or too big. Adjustable text.

* Generally the use of a page background is discouraged unless it's very subtle or aids the content. A bad example would be here.

* Different pages have different design: use consistent design.

I could go on and on and on I'm sure. There are many bad examples of websites on the net and you don't have to look too hard to find them. However your site does not have to be one of them.

If you're going to do it, do it properly.

Robert Smith

Director of Creative Glow http://www.creativeglow.com