The face of a company used to be its people, its products and its services. Although these three factors still contribute to making a business competitively strong, clients and customers don’t have to look very far to come face-to-face with a company and get that all important first impression – all they have to do is go into a company’s website.
With so much importance being put on the online presence of companies and so many companies out there that are just a click away, professional designed web page should be top on a company’s online strategy’s list.
Before we get into statistics and let the numbers do the talking, let’s think about a very simple and universal example. If you were looking to buy a pair of shoes from a shoemaker and the shoes he or she were wearing were falling apart, would you go home with shoes from this person? Probably not because you don’t want to waste money on something that won’t last very long and you don’t want to buy from someone who seems to not respect what they do. The same logic goes into web design: the more professional your design is, the more serious customers will take you.
Statistically speaking, 75 per cent of your web visitors will decide if you are credible or not just from your web design. Ninety-four per cent of visitors will make their first impressions based on design related issues, according to a study of websites by researchers at Northumbria and Sheffield Universities.
In order to put this number in perspective, and in order to help us understand just how important gaining a good first impression is and how little time we have to do it in, it only takes around 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about a website.
A study by adobe in 2015, under the name The State of Content: Expectations on the Rise, states that 38 per cent of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive. Plus, the record also states that two thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain.
The amount of research to support the fact that a professionally designed web page will keep more users engaged while also creating a good first impression – and a lasting sense of creditability – goes on and on, but with the whole world wide web at your fingertips, the truth is out there. So, go forth and see which websites attract you more and why, and you will see that the common link between the websites that are top on your list is their professional web design.