What can you do in 50 milliseconds?
Before you answer “not much,” consider recent Google research that suggests one thing you can do in 50 milliseconds is give someone a bad first impression of your website. How fast is that? By the time you count to “one-Mississippi,” you could theoretically have had 20 visitors determine your website isn’t worth their time. Feeling the pressure?
I’m often astounded by the lack of importance many companies – large, small and every shape and size in between – place on website design. I even know some small business owners who don’t have a website at all. Whether you are struggling or thriving as a company, an improved web presence will assuredly improve your business; conversely, a poor web presence – or no web presence at all – will most certainly be a roadblock to success.
Think about some of the bad websites you may have landed on during some of your own web searches (see this post for some inspiration). If you’re like me, you immediately back out of sites whose mediocre or downright awful designs cause you to question their credibility – apparently within 50 milliseconds. Right or wrong, most of us will initially trust websites that look good and dismiss ones that don’t before we ever even get to the content. Certainly, there are companies that have succeeded despite an outdated or subpar website, but in this day and age, they are likely the exception to the rule.
Image preview of Proforma.com
Which brings us to Proforma. In the interest of full disclosure, we have been in need of an updated website for quite some time now but previous redesign attempts never fully got off the ground. Today, we are very proud to unveil our new website at the same url: Proforma.com.
The sleeker, more modern Proforma.com (and the related redesign of the Proforma Blog) better represents who we are as a company. After spending a considerable amount of time laying out the page structure, tweaking the finest design details, crafting content that delivers the right message and selecting images that help establish the look and feel we aimed for, we’re confident the new site will create a positive first impression with viewers in those all-important 50 milliseconds after they land on Proforma.com.
In the coming months, I’ll examine some specific ways you can and should consider polishing up your web presence, pulling from our experiences in first launching and then continuing to fine tune our new website, so stay tuned!