Tips on Making Sure Your Site Gives an Awesome First Impression

[Merle Gibbins]

Tips on Making Sure Your Site Gives an Awesome First Impression

First Impressions Count

Before reading any further I want you to go over to your website right now.

Then scrunch up your eyes and assess the design of it ignoring any written content, videos or audios that might be on there.

Even if just for a split second can you take an objective look at what you see?  And what it is communicating non-verbally.

For example:

1. Does the design look professional or as if it has been done by an enthusiastic amateur?
2. Is it instantly apparent where the reader’s eyes should first go to?
3. Is the text easy to read?  Or do you have to squint to read it?
4. Does it show with confidence that you can solve your reader’s problems?
5. Now, if you were a stranger to your site would you trust this business to be competent, capable and trustworthy?

I know if may be difficult for you to be objective as we tend to get a bit sentimental about our work and don’t notice any imperfections.

Your Website Design Says A Lot About You

If a reader sees a professional design then it automatically gives them confidence that care has been put into the content as well.  A website design that looks amateurish on the other hand could trigger the reader to look for flaws and sloppiness in the business as well !!

I know it’s not fair, but that’s how it works. Your site is judged instantly based on how it looks.

It is a lot easier than you think to make an extreme makeover, so let’s take a look at some common business damaging design mistakes and how you could quickly fix them.

Is your text easy to read?

Text that’s hard to read will suppress your conversion, social shares, traffic, and success. Here are some important improvements you can make to your sites readability:

• If you’re using white text on a dark background, don’t do anything else until you have fixed that. It makes for a miserable reading experience, and it will cut down dramatically on the links and shares you receive.
• Your text should feel like black text on a white background, even if the colors are actually very dark gray with very light gray.
• If you’re using one of those fancy textured backgrounds that’s taking forever to load — replace it. The speed of your site is an essential element of a reader friendly design.
• You need to bump up your font size and I would recommend 14pt as a good starting point.
• Now speaking about the typeface (better known as the font) I would suggest choosing readability before anything else.  It doesn’t matter how much you love all that fancy writing, hard to read typeface I would suggest in replacing it.
• Don’t use different typefaces all over your site. Choose one for your headers/subheaders and one for your body text.
• You should always underline your links. Designers love to play with more attractive ways of indicating links — sadly, none of them is as clear to the reader as underlined text is.
• When writing your paragraphs try to keep them to bite sized pieces.  It is much easier on the eye that way.
• Try and avoid very wide or very narrow columns for your text: both are hard to read. Columns that are 450-550 pixels wide tend to work very well.

Content that’s formatted to be reader-friendly is content that will get shared more freely.

Does your read know where to look? – Come back tomorrow for more tips and advice …….

If you enjoyed reading this post I would appreciate your feedback so please share, tweet, google+ and comment.  Thank you

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[Merle Gibbins]

Thank you Angela

[Angela Valadez]

You've delivered some great tips Merle on First Impressions and Your Site.  Thanks so much for sharing.  Liked and Shared.

[Merle Gibbins]

Thank you Fouzi