Have you ever wondered what clients get out of a website? Do they simply see a site as a listing of information the company wants to share with them? Or does the Web convey a deeper message about the firm? A recent study in the European Journal of Information Systems focused on scientifically examining the impressions that people form after having viewed a company website. The results were fascinating.

Creating a website is about impression management. This concept has been turned into a virtual science by marketing experts, psychologists, and technical specialists. The strategy of both multinational corporations as well as small companies can be greatly enhanced by a well-developed website. The study found that after viewing a website people constructed a detailed image of the organization including assumptions about the experience, innovation, competence, and customer-orientation of the company. These impressions stemmed from features such as the site’s content, graphics, layout, external links, fonts, and use of advanced technology.

An important insight gleaned for psychology is that users tend to approach a website with a certain generic image in mind, called schema, which serves to shape expectations. As long as the site meets the general expectation of the clients, people’s minds will fill in the missing information to match what would be found in comparable sites. This has two implications for the company creating a website:

1. Make sure that your overall site design is consistent with other companies in your industry so that viewing it activates a desirable image (schema) in your viewer’s mind.
2. For business characteristics that are very important to you, do not leave room for the viewer’s mind to fill in the gaps but provide the information yourself. For example, if you want to create an impression of customer-orientation, create a publish feedback/ contact link and explicitly state your commitment to customer service.

Creating a website for your business can be a daunting task. However, with some help from the latest research any company can dress up its site and achieve the image that would best serve its business purposes.

Regardless of all your advertising and efforts to bring new customers to your online business, your success will depend on your ability to attract the attention of new viewers. The marketplace today is replete with new businesses trying to get noticed. Clearly, this is a tougher task than some may think as about 50% of all new businesses will fail by the end of their first year and the number will be close to 90% after 5 years.

So how do you go about helping your online business stand out? Here are five tips to help your endeavor:

1.    Keep some tried and true basics. An unfortunate number of ‘new age’ professionals have started neglecting the foundation principles of good presentation. When dressing up your website, follow a consistent layout, keep the colors neutral enough that they are easy to read, don’t experiment too much with font styles, and don’t try to cram too much information into a front page. Readers’ brains respond better to a presentation that follows familiar patterns. If the information is easy to physiologically process after a quick scan, it is much more likely to catch a client’s attention than if special effort is needed to adjust to colors, text wrapping, etc.
2.    Find your edge. Keeping the traditional basics lays the foundation to get you noticed. Your unique edge will help you stand out. It is relatively easy to let your imagination roam free when working on a site. Find a graphic that truly captures the spirit of your business, use a (short) catch phrase, or give the viewer a taste of your unique ideas. However, remember this is a first impression only. There is such a thing as too much edge and it can hurt you.
3.    Invest time in research. Give your customers a sense that you have noticed them, together with their interests and preferences, and they will notice you. The hurried way in which many new ventures are started today leave a lot of consumers at least mildly dissatisfied with how not unique they are. A little time put into research early on will spare you a lot of time in follow up investigations and attempts to salvage a loss.
4.    Practice customer service. Customer service is an art, it’s a skill, it’s a must. If you don’t provide a superior experience to your customers, be sure that your competitors will. So create your website in a way that is user-friendly and provides easy links to help navigate the site and communicate with you. Respond to inquiries as soon as possible or post clear timelines for the frequency with which inquiries are addressed. You never know which email inquiry comes from a potential investor who is feeling you out before making a business proposition.
5.    Reserve a couple of tricks. This is the test of true creativity. The challenge is to keep your audience interested after having caught their initial attention. For your online business this may mean setting up a feature that activates a particularly appealing graphic for any user which has lingered 20 seconds on your front page.  If you have banner ads, you may want to adjust the ad sequence and duration to first show those of the most reputable or relevant advertisers you have. This may indirectly increase the time the viewer spends on your site. Your initial presentation has already been noticed, the final touch you add will make it actually stand out.

First impressions and the moments immediately following those are crucial for the success of your online business. It is often in that period that your customers will be making a (not completely conscious) decision whether to give you a further chance. Take a creative but moderate stance to get yourself noticed and you will have a larger audience to dazzle with your unique ideas.