Just like the need to wear a decent suit to a job interview, you need to dress up your website with the help of a Greenville, SC web design professional to make a good first impression. Given the fleeting nature of the Internet, you literally have only seconds to convince a potential customer that your site is worth visiting. Otherwise, they’ll just click the close button and leave. You get the point: appearance counts.

Various studies confirm that a professional-looking website does lead to more sales. These studies substantiate a phenomenon called the “halo effect”.

What is the halo effect, you may ask? An article posted on the website of user experience consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group explains what the halo effect is about and what it entails.

The Halo Effect is a well documented social-psychology phenomenon that causes people to be biased in their judgments by transferring their feelings about one attribute of something to other, unrelated, attributes.

 

For example, a tall or good-looking person will be perceived as being intelligent and trustworthy, even though there is no logical reason to believe that height or looks correlate with smarts and honesty.

 

The Halo Effect works both in both positive and negative directions:

 

• If you like one aspect of something, you’ll have a positive predisposition toward everything about it.
• If you dislike one aspect of something, you’ll have a negative predisposition toward everything about it.

In web speak, what the halo effect means is that if a user has a positive impression of the quality of the front page of a website, he will believe that level of quality will reflect in the site’s other pages as well. Clearly, in the world of web design, appearance trumps content—at least initially. After all, what’s the use of having authoritative and comprehensive information on your site if your visitors won’t linger long enough to read them?

Millions of websites pepper the Internet, and you have the unenviable task of making sure your site stands out from among the thousands of other sites that offer similar products, services, and content. This is where a professional Greenville, SC website design firm can help. With their expertise, you’ll have the website you need to grab users’ attention, compel them to stay, and eventually make a sale.

(Source: The Halo Effect, Nielsen Norman Group, November 9, 2013)