You Only Get One Chance at a First Impression

How many times have you been told it's important to make a good first impression in your life? Probably many. As a Web designer you should take this seriously because you have as little as 50 milliseconds to capture the interest of a potential customer. Creating a fast-loading, visually appealing site is vitally important to it's success.

These are a few things you should consider while designing your website:

Keep it simple

Putting too many elements on the page can create confusion. Create a main focus, main objective of what you want your customers to do when arriving on the site. Having to scan through rows and rows of content to find what you are looking for can be frustrating and off-putting. Keep the pages minimal and clean so people can easily find what they are looking for.

Intuitive navigation

Anger. Confusion. Frustration. These are emotions you can conjure up if you have poorly designed navigation. Pages should be designed with clear legible navigation so people can find what they are looking for; whether they are frequent internet users or novices.

Consistency is crucial

When navigating  form one page to another, your customers should not feel like they are going from one site to a another. Keep similar elements e.g., fonts, colours, styles; to help your customer know they are on the same site.

Colour is the key

Colour choice is a crucial decision in every website design. You may be provided a colour scheme by a company or you may be choosing a colour scheme for a company; either way it is important to be consistent. Another thing to be conscious of is having strong contrast between the text and background colour for easy readability.

Sites that can help you with your colour selections are:

http://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/rating?time=30
http://www.colourlovers.com/