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First Impressions - A Sloppy Site Provokes Doubt!

December 26, 2006

“If you happen to be the owner of a well-established brand-name site such as Amazon.com, the issue of trust is a non-issue. However if you are one of the faceless millions of netpreneurs scattered across the globe you are precisely that…Faceless! You are working from a position of weakness in that you don’t have brand-name recognition behind you and that you’re an unknown entity.” — Ba Kiwanuka

Being unknown means that you as the owner of a website must cultivate and sustain trust — The competition is vastly distributed and is cut-throat, therefore you — a “Brandless” and “Faceless” entity, must design your website with your users in mind, first — followed closely by Search Spiders.

First, the information and design of your home page must communicate the purpose of your site, precisely.

Second, your navigation and menu mechanism should not only be on the homepage but on all other pages too. Your navigation system plays a critical role — It gives the user access to the rest of your website and more importantly, it gives the user an impression about the depth of your content — Poor navigation translates into a poor first impression.

Conversely, overwhelming navigation can be a turnoff — It’s an intricate balance that must be handled very carefully.

Clarity and ease of use is therefore paramount — Your homepage must summarize your site in a “nutshell.”

In the same breath, a site that “greets” you with a large “dose” of adsense advertiser links may not be a sloppy site, necessarily, but the fact that the user has to scroll more than halfway down the page to see any “real” content, may prod the user into dismissing your site as an irritant “adsense farm.”

Visual appeal to the user is paramount, but must not be implemented at the expense of webpage “Load Time” — Due to too many images on a page. Excessive image use usually slows down your webpage(s), and can steer your users away to your competitors. If you have to have many images on your webpage(s), do optimize them to reduce load time — The GIFBot by NetMechanic is a free tool that compresses your GIF, JPEG, and animated GIF images — Decreasing image file size without sacrificing image quality!

A clean, navigable, professional, and fast loading website will ensure pleasant first impressions — and hopefully sustain repeat visits by users.

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Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Search Engines, Web-Dev-Design 

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