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WEB DESIGN - 30 SECONDS TO IMPRESS
Your ability to retain a customer who decides to visit your site will be determined in less than
30 seconds. Think about how you wander around the internet. What is your criteria for staying and exploring a
site? I bet you make your decision to stay or go in 30 seconds but probably never stopped to think about it.
And that 30 seconds is generous! Depending on a number of factors, they may never stay close to that long. I do
discuss elsewhere on this site about how to get visitors to your site but for now we will assume they have found you
and are looking at your homepage.
A web site visitor's first impression of your site will be a combination of the speed of the homepage load and
the design - your look and feel. Let's address the download first. Not everyone had high-speed internet
connectivity. Believe it or not, there are still some dialups out there. A good rule to follow is to test your
download at the slowest speed. If that isn't a possibility, be sure to clear your cache and your history and load
your site from your server. That is what happens when you clear those - it forces your machine to go back to the
server to get the site all over again. Too much focus on your appearance can be detrimental to your download and
what I call your sites 'stickiness'. Market research indicates the speed of the homepage coming into fullview on
the customer's screen to be the initial most important factor in staying or going.
Let's assume your page load was good and the site design eye-appealing to your visitor. The final factor in the
first 30 seconds is how easy is it to find what they are looking for - EASE OF NAVIGATION. Like the
proverbial spider who tries to lore the fly deeper into its web, you must make it simple for the visitor to get
to what she is looking for - venture deeper into your web(site).
In summary, make sure your page loads quickly, is appealing to the eye and allows the customer to navigate easily
and you stand a much greater chance of keeping them on your site past the 30 second threshold.
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