Seven Seconds

Seven seconds – that's how long psychologists say it takes a person to create a first and lasting impression - good or bad. It's no accident that most successful business people tend to be well groomed to impress clients. Of course there are exceptions, typically though it's usually tougher for the scruffy to impress. If this applies to personal appearance it is just as important in terms of websites.

If someone asks me what I think is the most important aspect of a website, that's a very complex question to answer and it does depend on the purpose of the site and how valuable being there is to the visitor. For example, let's take a website that might be giving away Ipods or something equally valuable. It's unlikely the website would have to be that great to perform the function of giving away sought after electronic items. Most people would figure it out and ignore untidy or badly designed aspects of the site.

In the real world of commercial websites appearance is very important - in the case of any business providing other than low budget services or products it's paramount. We mentioned Apple's Ipod earlier and when you consider Apple's success, yes they produce products that are well thought out and work well but then so do many, many other companies. The reason people buy Apple products in massive numbers (if they were able to admit it) is the pretty factor.

When you examine the analytics for a website there is a crucial figure called the bounce rate in amonst all the other data. The bounce rate of a web site is the the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page. This figure will usually but not always give you a good indication of what impression the site creates.The higher the bounce rate the more visitors leave after looking only at one page. The assumption here is that visitors have arrived at the site that offers what they were looking for. Either way first impressions can be changed by careful consideration regarding design - attention to the relative effect on the bounce rate is then more important than an absolute figure.

The other key factor is average time on each page. As a general rule the longer visitors stay on a site the more likely they are to buy.Certainly less than seven seconds and you've probably lost them :-)