According to a report published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology, website visitors made decisions regarding the aesthetics of a website – in other words “how pretty your website looks”, in just a twentieth of a second!  Then stay or click away, based on that decision.

In the blink of an eye, visitors to your website decide to stay or go elsewhere.  Most of them don’t even realize they’re making these lightning fast decisions based on just the looks of the websites they’re browsing through.

From BioEdOnline.org - For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google, says Marc Caudron of London web-design agency Pod1. This makes a user's first impression even more critical, he explains. "You'll get a list of sites, click the top one, and then either say 'I've engaged' and give it a few more seconds, or just go back to Google," he says.

The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the 'halo effect': if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content (such as this article, for example) more favorably.

And a study conducted by Stanford University has this to say –

“… nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.”

In fact, aesthetics was mentioned more than fifty percent more often than the next highest rated issue.

Rather than bore you with more quotes and studies, I’ll trust that you agree that a website must have an element of beauty.  But just what does that mean?  What may look great to a sixteen year old girl probably won’t appeal to a corporate executive.  And even a web design that looks good, probably won’t be effective if it’s one of those tired looking html template designs you see everywhere.

And then there’s branding to think about.  Your “brand” is your key to success. Your website absolutely must fit with your company’s branding and overall theme if it is to maximize its effectiveness.

What might it cost to hire a web designer to create an eye-catching design for your website with colors and theme that fit your clientele and your brand?  It is rumored that Eddie Bauer, No. 55 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide at the time, paid tens of thousands of dollars for their award-winning 2002 web design.

OK, so your website needs to be designed with aesthetics as a priority, but why do we recommend Joomla?

You have three basic choices –

1. You can pay a web designer to create a custom web design from scratch and hope that he or she is really good.
2. You can choose from a tired, worn-out template that is being used on thousands of other websites, and pay a web designer to implement it for you.
3. Use Joomla.

With the first two choices, you will likely still need to pay a web designer to implement the design and you’ll probably have to redo your entire website whenever you change designs.

There are tens of thousands of professional design templates for Joomla that can be installed with just a few mouse-clicks.  Many of these designs come with multiple choices of color themes that you can change with just a click of a mouse.  Why pay designers to create your website look from scratch when the work has already been done for you?

When you want to change designs, you need do little more than a  few mouse-clicks and select a new Joomla design template.  There is no need to totally redo your website, although some designs implement in different ways that may mean changing some minimal content configuration.  Even then, this is “user-doable” without the aid of a web professional.

A company that is seen as having some of the finest Joomla designs is RocketTheme.com.  RocketTheme designs are not free to the public, but customers of CompuSolver.com can use any RocketTheme design at no cost whatsoever! (one per domain that we work on).

To sum up, the aesthetics of your website relate directly to your bottom line, and Joomla gives you a quick and easy way to choose from a wide array of professional designs and makes it simple to implement a new design quickly, thus upholding ease of maintenance and retaining flexibility.   CompuSolver can help you choose a design that best fits your business and your branding.