Your website is your online shopping store or an office that showcases your commercial products, information or services. If the façade including the name of your store is not attractive enough to capture the attention of the customers at first sight, you may lose your business.

While designing a website keep in mind that it will face competitions from numerous other websites vying for of the customers who are really short of time and patience. If a customer finds your website clumsy, flashy, dark colored, strangely designed with quaint fonts, figures and graphics or is difficult to navigate, he will at once close it and go for another find.

The oft-repeated saying goes, ‘the first impression is the last impression’.

Therefore, the moment a person visits your website he should be able to exclaim: Wow, this is the site I was looking for’.

How to attract a customer at first sight?

The first and the most important factor that can pull the customers to your website is its name or domain name. The name of your website should consist of the keyword or phrase that your targeted audience is looking for. The domain name should contain the keywords or phrases that the searcher is most likely to type in the box of the search engine.

Once the customer lands upon your website, the first point of interaction with him is the home page. This is the page that describes what your site has to offer by way of services, products or information. The content on the home page should succinctly describe the central theme or the objective of the website starting with its title and sub-title.

The content describing the site should be neatly paragraphed. Each paragraph should be preceded by a sub-title which itself should contain the sub category of the main keyword or phrase.

The content should be richly interspersed with those keywords or phrases that provide solution, product or information that the customer is looking for. The important points of information should be mentioned in bolded and colored words or sentences. The key words or sentences should also be either bulleted or numbered to draw the reader’s attention.

The content should not be worded in decorative language to impress the readers with the linguistic skills of the webmaster. The information contained of the content should be to-the-point, simple and straightforward.

Each new idea or sentence should be natural and a logical sequence to the preceding idea.

This style of writing will compel the customer to browse through the website. The reader should be impelled to click on the hyperlinks contained in the content to access other pages on the website for more information till he reaches the sales page. He should not leave the website without parting with his email address for further communication.

Another important feature of the home page should be its presentation or color scheme. The home page should be so designed and presented that it harmonizes with the nature of your content and objective. The background color should be soft and allow the content to be easily read and understood. It should create the right ambience that attracts the attention of the visitor, makes him comfortable and encourages him to stay on the site for further perusal.

The graphic or picture, if any, should clearly convey and illustrate the idea of the content and support it. It should be designed to be a better substitute for a thousand words thus sparing the time and attention of the reader. Above all the figure or the graphic should not take ages to open up and try the patience of the visitor.

The next important point on the home page is the menu of the website content. The menu should contain the sub-topics or sub-categories of the main keyword. The menu is generally placed on the left side of the home page in sufficiently bolded, attractively colored hyper links.

Here again some webmasters commit the mistake of expressing the menu in figures, abbreviations, icons or symbols which often fail to communicate their intent and content. The menus should be expressed in plain simple textual links consisting of important keywords or phrases.

Above all the links should work instantly. If a link takes a long time in opening the next page or the window, it may drive the visitor away from the website.