First impressions mean everything. You've been told that your whole life, heard about it when you've been preparing for a job interview, when you go to meet your future in-laws for the first time - "you never get a second chance to make a first impression". It's an important concept. All things being equal, you want your initial encounter with someone to be memorable for all the right reasons. You want the potential new boss to think highly of you, and your future father-in-law to think that you there must some redeeming quality about you.
So what about your business' website? What does the appearance of your website say to your visitors? Are you showing up to your dream-job interview in shorts and a t-shirt? Or are you showing up "dressed for success", ready to impress? Is your virtual résumé written haphazardly on the equivalent of notebook paper with crayons? Okay - sounds a little harsh. But the point is that you will be judged by the appearance of your website by your visitors and it could mean the difference between winning a potential customer, and losing one.
The impression your visitors are confronted with when they visit your site are immediate and lasting. If you're curious about such things, just take a look at your website statistics. How long does someone stay on your site? What's your conversion rate? What's your bounce rate? How many pages per visit does a visitor see? All these will speak volumes about not only the quality of your content, but also the appeal of the layout and design of your website.
It's important to make sure that you're using solid design principles when designing your website. Column widths, use of heading tags, use of images, color strategies, and typography all add up to creating a good - or bad - first impression. Here are a couple examples of stellar design work:
Certainly appearances aren't everything though. Even the best-looking sites still need to have quality content available to users. If it looks great, but provides little in terms of quality content, your site still won't do much for you. Write up quality content for your site. Really. Do it yourself. You can have someone write your content for you, but the one who has the most to gain - or lose - needs to be intimately invovled in its creation. Sometimes it's best to have a 'word-smith' take some plain, ordinary content and give more punch. I whole-heartedly encourage you to do that. However, the nuts and bolts of the content still need to find their origin with the one who knows the business best.
There are a lot of tools out there that will help you evaluate your content, and determine how your site appeals to search engines (you do want people finding you on all the major search engines, right?) and they're great for getting feedback on how your site is set up. One of the best is WebSiteGrader. This site will take a look at your site, and bench-mark it against other sites and give you a grade for your content. It checks all the essential elements of your pages and gives you feedback that can really help you maximize the impact of your site.
Another helpful site (that can be a little humbling) is Compete.com. This will compare your website traffic against that of your competition. The free version of this website is sufficient to get you some vital competitive information regarding how you compare to other sites in your market.
If you're going to expend the time and effort needed to put your business on the internet (something you should totally do), make sure that you do it right. If you're not the artistic type, talk to someone who is, and get their input on putting together an awesome theme. Make sure you're familiar with web development standards when you're putting it together or remodeling your existing site. Make sure your content reads well, flows, is intuitive, and is usable. Finally get a good design. Make sure that your site is visually appealing and keeps customers on your site.
