Today what I want to discuss with you is the importance of first impression online. The truth of the matter is your visitors, within three seconds, will make a judgment call on the quality of your product or services. Three seconds, this is how quickly they will come to a decision. When the visitor first arrive to your website, they’re going to judge if they are at the right place. Are you the company for them? Do you provide the quality of service or products they are looking for? Three seconds. Their impression of you is either going to be great or not so great. Either way, they’re going to judge you and they don’t even know you.

It’s actually quite easy to make a great first impression. All it takes is great website design. And what you will need to do to accomplish that goal is to hire a professional team of programmer and web developer. You can, of course, go with the template option. It costs typically between $5 and $50 a month. There are GoDaddy, Bluehost, many company offering templates, but the truth of the matter is it’s going to look like a template. It is not going to look customized. It is not going to stand out. It’s not going to set you apart from your competition. So, templates have their place. Generally, we suggest them for smaller size company, maybe mom-and-pop, one-person businesses perhaps. If you want to set yourself apart from all your competitors online, you do need a customized website design for your company.

You may be concerned about the cost of hiring such team. Just think of it, hiring a team of developers to provide custom website design is truly investing in the success of your company. It is like buying a building. It is yours to keep. It is your website. It becomes an asset. If you were to even ask for business loan, the website and the value of your website become part of your business asset. One crucial element a lot of website designers forget to think about is your target audience. We all have a target audience and what it is, is your bread and butter. Who is your best customer? Which customer gives you the most profits and the most pleasure at the exact same time? That’s your target audience.

Here at Business Website Center, we design the website for them, not for you, the business owner. We design the site for your customers. We are very concerned and interested in the return on investment. We want to make sure that the website is not just breath taking and impressive. We want to make sure it brings you the highest rates of return on your website investment. This is why we always go back to that target audience and have a discussion with you back and forth and truly, who are we trying to reach out there. Who is going to give you the most money for what you’re selling? And the website design has to accomplish that goal in speaking directly to those people.

Custom website design is not just pretty graphics and nice imagery. It’s a lot of different elements that somehow come together in a very cohesive way. It could the right choice of colors, and we will later do a video blog on color and the importance of selecting the right one for your business, but it’s all the details. Are we using drop shadows? Are we using sharp edges or rounded edges? Are we going to have lots of visual? Are we going to have videos on your homepage? Are we not having any pictures whatsoever? What about the call to action? How are we going to present them? We want the custom website design to truly be different from every other website you’ve seen. We want people to go there and say, “Wow! They have spent a good amount of money on their website. It is impressive, and I am here at the right place, and they know what they’re doing because I’m totally impressed by their website.” This is how you want your visitor to feel when they go there.

Today, if you already have a website of your own, I’d like you take… Make that little exercise. Go to your competitor’s website, take a look at it, maybe they select the two best ones. The one you truly thought, “They did something right here.” You don’t know why it’s right, it just feels right. Then go back to your own website. Are you getting the same feeling? Take a look at your website from the outside. I know you know how it looks. I know you know the pages. Just take a look at it from a new perspective and say, “Is my website impressive? Does my website look customized?” If the answer is ‘No’, you need to talk to a team of experts. And here at Business Website Center, we would love to speak with you about the importance of custom website and how we can assist you. And we’ll be happy to share with you our portfolio website. So, if you have any questions, just feel free to give us a call. Thank you and you have yourself a fabulous week.