3... 2... 1... and your customers are gone

How many times have you visited a website and couldn’t find what you were looking for? It’s frustrating isn’t it! Unless there was a reason why you had to use that particular website, I guess you clicked away and went elsewhere.

What about a website that took a long time to load, or perhaps a one where you couldn’t find the phone number?

What about a website that had everything that you wanted, but just looked too cheap? Or conversely what about one that looked too expensive?

So why should this be any different when people are browsing your website?

The short answer is it’s not.

There’s a widely accepted rule known as the “3 second rule”. This means that you have around three seconds to capture someone’s attention or they’ll go elsewhere.

Within the first few seconds it’s imperative that you make it clear to a user:

• Who you are
• What you do
• Why they should choose you
• What they should do next

It seems obvious, but it’s amazing how many people miss this basic concept and it is likely to lose them custom.

Don’t necessarily take these points literally; for example you don’t need to necessarily tell a person why they should chose you, but could achieve the same effect with bullet points of your benefits, with a decent design, well-placed imagery, or testimonials.

For example if you have corporate clients you can use their logos. Having Pepsi, Waitrose and Sony in your portfolio will give you far more credit that saying “we’re a professional agency working with corporates”.

These are all basic concepts and it seems so obvious once it has been pointed out to you, but looking at your own website from a client’s perspective is incredibly difficult especially as it’s your website for your business that you know better than anyone.

It doesn’t matter if you like your website, but it’s imperative that your clients does!

That’s where we come in, this is what we do, we can be a fresh set of independent eyes that will look at your website and give you honest feedback even if it’s not what you want to hear.

Using these techniques we’ve transformed many websites, one client reporting his enquiries went up 5200% (10 enquiries a year increased to 10 a week).

If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch with one of the team.

We are Webbed Feet ^UK, we are web design UX experts.