First Impressions Count in Website Design

Andy King writes "Web designers have as little as 50 milliseconds to capture the interest of potential customers, according a new report by researchers at Carleton University. Through the halo effect, first impressions can influence subsequent judgments of website credibility and buying decisions."

But if they don't have broadband...

[MichaelSmith]

...you have a whole 50 seconds for them to take the page in as it loads.

This article has been around so many times I have now thought of something to post against it.

Web Site Peeves

[Anonymous Coward]

50 milliseconds huh?

Here's my list of things that almost guarantee that I'll leave your site behind, never to look back.

1 - Music - Your taste in music is not mine. Your music sucks!
2 - Pages that don't load - It's usually the page that looks like it has exactly what you were searching for too!
3 - Pages that don't contain the information "as advertised" - you know the ones...you click on a link and it goes to some search page that tries to reset your home page.
4 - Pages that are more banner ad than web page - Get over it. No one wants to see that much advertising. 5 - Anything that blinks - Thank god the W3C deprecated the blink tag
6 - Anything that demands I install a plug-in for "the user experience" - espeically those stupid cursors 7 - Anything that spawns pop ads
8 - Anything that doesn't present easy to read and use navigation (www.thetrueagency.com/true.html is a prime example of this)
9 - Anything that doesn't have a sufficient amount of contrast between the text and the background.
10 - Anything that uses more than 5 different fonts on the same page - Its a web site, not a comic book.
11 - Sites that redirect to another redirect - We get the idea that you move - a lot.
12 - Anything that uses more than 6 colors on the same page - It looks like a circus barfed on your page.

Ok guys

[tannhaus]

This had to be on purpose. They're taking the piss with us. No one is that incompetent. They're having a joke at our expense, so just let it ride

Re:Trupe!

[arivanov]

This is a record as far as I know. Dupes - yes. But tripple posting of the same garbage is a bit too much to my liking. Even on a slow going Friday morning.

Re:Web Site Peeves

[lucm]

According to your list, here is what you should do:

1) Avoid Geocities
2) Don't browse the internet for free porn or warez

You will then discover a brand new internet, the one for grownups.

This is the third time! New low for /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors quit smoking pot and do your jobs!

Re:Ah my god

[1u3hr]

Everytime it happens, I post a link like this where I can find the other articles in less than 10 seconds, and I don't even work as an "editor" for slashdot.

Even simpler: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=50+millisecond s [slashdot.org], by typing the words "50 milliseconds" in ot Slashdot's search.

Or try http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=radio [slashdot.org] for another.

It does make me wonder what the editors read

[bgfay]

I don't get how this could happen a third time. Let's hope that this is a joke. Otherwise, it really would make a good topic for the next About Slashdot article. Wow. I've been reading for a long time and haven't seen this happen before. Weird. I think that this is some of the reason why editors and CmdrTaco get so much crap hurled at them. If you give people the ammunition, they're likely to fire it on you sooner or later.

All that said, it's not the end of the world. It just makes the site look sloppy and haphazard rather than polished. In many ways, it's kind of the stigma that Linux has faced when compared to Windows. Oh well.

Re:This is NOT a Trupe! RTFA - Original Research

[proggoddess]

Wouldn't the original article link normally be posted in a Slashback?