Designing Websites
To Sell
December 2007
The Take Away
Websites which are credibility-based
sell products and services. They must do this at first glance
to create conversion rates. The key is a Credibility-Based
Logo Design sm as the cornerstone of the company website.
Secondly, the website home page must have a consistent "look"
of credibility as the company logo. The company logo, home
page and subsequent pages give website credibility for the
visitor leading up to the purchase page.
The company logo and the website home page give First
Glance Web Optimization which occurs usually within
the first eight seconds.
This article presents a new
perspective for planning and designing company logos and
company websites. It is researched based, giving support
to new theories about logo and website design. New terms,
Credibility-Based Logo Design, Credibility-Based
Websites, Website Consistency and First Glance Web Optimization
are introduced by the author.
Why are New Perspectives for Company
Logo and Website Design Needed at this Time?
Most websites lose over 90 percent or more of their visitors
within a few seconds upon landing on your site. The following
is a very recent quote furnished by Google AdWords.
So, you've refined your keywords, optimized your bids,
and written AdWords text ads that pull in tons of targeted
clicks, but after looking at your Google Analytics teports,
you realize that your landing page has a bounce rate of
91%.
Which means that 91% of the users coming to your site are
quickly glancing around and leaving, deciding immediately
that this site isn't for them.
Recent research suggests that users decide to stay or leave your site in 8 seconds or less.
In this short time frame,
visitors don't have much time to read anything about the
site. Like most perception at an early stage, this is a
visual thing. New research tells us that the early perception
of website trust is no different than trust in the real
world. Research on website trust shows that people want
to know about the company behind the website in an instant.
First Glance Web Optimization
When visitors land on a website,
the first thing they do is to evaluate instantly whether
they can or cannot trust the information on the site enough
to continue. Like all information, this is a matter of whether
or not the source of the information can be trusted to overcome
perceptions of risk, uncertainty and even possible identity
theft. Trust or no trust happens during the visitor's initial
impressions or "first glance" at a website when
the visitor is still unfamiliar with the vendor.
In people-to- people interaction,
we evaluate the person doing the talking before we accept
the person's message. Tonya Reiman who evaluates non-verbal
behavior of people on TV and in seminars gives this familiar
observation:
First impressions affect everything and everyone. Studies show that job interviews are basically
decided within the first few moments of an encounter and are based more on how much the interviewer likes the
applicant as opposed to the requirements of the position or the background of the interviewee. Research out this
year (2006) indicates that we determine whether we feel someone is trustworthy in just 1/10 of a second. Did you
read that?? 1/10 of a second - a mere blink to conclude whether we have belief, confidence, faith and security
about someone. That is pretty powerful.
Malcolm Gladwell, author
of The Tipping Point and most recently, Blink, calls this
leaping to conclusions "adaptive unconscious" and considers
this field as one of the most important new studies in psychology
as to why we make snap decisions as a way of life. Adaptive
unconscious studies examine how we draw conclusions intuitively
in an instant as apposed to careful deliberation and analysis.
The author reminds us of meeting someone for the first time,
interviewing someone or being interviewed, or reacting to
a something new. We use our adaptive unconscious mechanisms
to make judgments at first glace. It is our "gut feeling"
about something or someone.
Gladwell says that this "thin
slicing" of available information is perhaps a throwback
to our ancestors meeting an animal in woods. Blink is a
best selling book devoted to the power of first glance judgments
in our life and "adaptive unconscious" findings
to back up Gladwell's well written book.
Website First Glace "Thin Slicing"
On a website, we evaluate
the company on the landing page also called the home page
during the first three seconds of a website encounter at
"first glance.” Like other first time encounters,
the visitor and vendor do not have a personal relationship
history. The visitor makes a first glance evaluation on
what information, verbal and visual, is available. This
is primarily based on the company logo, a headline and the
design of the landing page. Otherwise, the vendor is faceless.
It is, therefore, imperative
that the company communicates credibility at first glance
with the three elements the visitors sees: the company logo,
headline and landing page design. The following suggestions
will increase website credibility and conversion rates.
(For those interested in more about the research findings,
please visit www.powerlogos.com or e-mail the author at
bill@haigbranding.com)
The following are suggestions
by Dr. BJ Fogg taken from his Stanford University research
on website credibility. My contribution to Dr. Fogg's work
is how a company with a credibility-based logo design and
credibility-based website design together with design consistency
throughout the website. This will increase optimum website
credibility leading to higher conversion rates and sales.
Continue reading Designing Websites
To Sell
© William L. Haig, Ph.D. or Bill Haig,
Ph.D. 2007
This is an original work of the author. All rights reserved. Copyright
registration will be applied for. No part of this article may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, and recording or otherwise, without
prior written permission of the author. |
