Making a Good First Impression

by Trey Pennewell

Published on this site: September 10th, 2005 - See more articles from this month

You only get once chance to make a first impression. This is true with all things in life, and it is true for an online business. The reason why your first impression on the Internet is so very important is because most visitors and potential customers will only give your website a 15 second overview, before deciding whether to stay or to move one. Your homepage is how you get your foot in the door with surfers. If your homepage has a poor appearance or is not user friendly, your visitor will likely move on to one of your competitors.

You have seen poorly designed websites and homepages. They are the ones with the annoying pop ups that you cannot get away from, the ones that make it difficult to find vital information that you are looking for, and the ones that are fraught with grammatical and spelling errors. I recently saw a website that had a side scroll window that I could not close. The worst thing about it was that the window overlapped the text on the homepage that I was trying to read. It cut off the first few letters of each sentence. This may not have been so bad if I was able to close the scrolling window, but I could not.

I have also seen websites that make it so difficult to find prices, membership information, contact information, and so forth, so much so that I simply gave up and went to a different site. I left the poorly designed site and went to a competitor’s website, even though I liked the first website’s product the best.

Perhaps it is because of my line of work, but nothing stands out to me more than poorly written content. Whether it is grammatical errors or spelling errors, I cannot help but focus on them. When I see a website where multiple words are misspelled, I usually leave, because poor grammar and spelling gives me the impression that the Webmaster does not care enough about his website to proofread it. In my mind, I cannot help but think that if the Webmaster doesn’t proofread the content, he or she will probably not be very detail oriented when it comes to meeting my customer needs. Remember that you only get one chance to make that first impression with potential customers and to get those customers to bookmark your website.

Now, before you start thinking that I am the spelling police of the Internet, I completely understand how easy it is to make minor errors. However, this is your business, and ultimately your homepage is your best advertisement to potential customers. In this regard, there is no room for errors. You need to make your homepage as customer friendly and professional as possible. With so many competitors on the Internet fighting for customers, you need to exercise control over the areas that you can control. Correct spelling and good grammar is perhaps one of the simplest things that you can control, when you are trying to create a professional image with your potential customers.

Not everyone feels comfortable with his or her writing skills. Others simply do not have the time or desire to write their website content or free reprint articles. Luckily, there are many writers who are eager to write your content for you. Many of these writers have years of experience and have written many articles, sales pages, and other types of content.

Employing a writer who can provide you with quality, well-written articles is especially important for those who use English as a second language. I have read and edited articles written by people whose first language was not English, and there have been many spelling and grammatical errors. Even those who reside in the United Kingdom or Australia may want to consider to whom they are marketing. If you are marketing to an American audience, then a U.K Webmaster may want to seek out an American writer, since there are many minor differences in the dialect. This is also true for Australian webmasters.

The worst foreign language offenders are those who rely on automated translation programs. If, for example, a Webmaster writes an article or site content in German and uses automated translation software, the words will be translated, but the readability of the copy will be lost. I once edited articles for a person, whose first language was not English, and he had used one of these automated software translation programs. Even I had a difficult time understanding what some of the sentences were trying to say. If you need assistance translating business documents, articles or sales copy from one language to another, may we recommend: http://linkexchange.etranslate.com/

The bottom line is that you want to turn your website visitors into customers. To do this, you need to make a good first impression. It is difficult to know what exact marketing technique will attract customers to your website. But, it is easy to make sure that your website is easy-to-navigate, easy-to-read, and most importantly, that it has a professional appearance. If your text is misspelled and poorly written, many customers will turn away from your site, and they will look for another website whose webmaster took the time to ensure a professional appearance for his or her website.

Trey Pennewell is a ghost writer at http://thePhantomWriters.com. On September 9, 2005, TPW had more than 50 Pre-Written ghosted articles available for purchase on a wide variety of topics. Custom ghost writing is also available on a job-by-job basis for a variety of writing needs. If you need to have very specialized ghost writing work done on your behalf, contact us to see if any of our three dozen ghost writers can meet your needs.