Websites have just 20th of a second to impress
Howard Lake | 19 January 2006 | News
A study published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology suggests that people make up their minds about the likely usefulness of a website in 50 milliseconds. That is not long to get across the value of your charity’s work and the need for people to support it financially.
The research will be useful ammunition for those charities who are not yet raising funds successfully online. Conversely successful online fundraising charities deserve even more praise if they are up against this lighting fast level of discrimination among web users.
The Canadian research team found that these first impressions counted because they tended to correlate with users’ impressions of a site over a longer period. An initial positive impression of a site was usually reflected in a positive impression generated after actually exploring and using the site.
Advertisement
So, if this research is correct, your fundraising message will only succeed on your website if the website itself is clearly laid out and attractively presented. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: good quality content in an otherwise poor website is not always going to be found, so a successful website needs to achieve a consistent level of quality across all its content.
What can you do to overcome this almost instant judgement? Clear branding, straightforward navigation, and short but intriguing headlines on pages would probably go some way to achieving this.
Let’s hope this page attracted your attention beyond those 50 milliseconds or you won’t be reading this.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.