Impress your web sites’ first time visitors- 14 steps to do it

• Fast Load Time: Ensure that your web pages load quickly. Usually people are very impatient. If your web pages load slowly, visitors to your site will leave and will have no desire to return. On the other hand, if your web pages are fast to load, the visitors will be encouraged to browse through your site as they already know that they don’t need to wait long for the pages to load.
• Error Messages: Check your site to note if there is any problem in accessibility. If visitors to your site can’t access it and an error message is displayed, they will leave and won’t return. If you find any errors, try to fix that or else be prepared to loose your potential customers.  
• Use of impressive colors: Be careful in your choice of colors. Selecting the right color combination requires careful thinking as it plays an important role in the overall attractiveness of your web site. So, choose colors that complement the others well and match the tone of your site.
• Establishing the brand: Your web site logo will play a major role in getting your brand recognized and making it popular on the web. You should have a logo that leaves a lasting impact on your visitors’ mind and make them think of your business every time they see it.  
• Header Images: Use images in the header that have the capability of creating a strong and positive first impression on your visitors.
• Typography: Don’t experiment too much with the typography and fonts. Stick to something conventional as a safe bet rather than going for some weird choices, which may appear lucrative but stand a higher probability of annoying visitors in the long run.
• Layout: The layout of your web site is a crucial design element that you should focus upon. You need to use a layout that draws attention to the important factors of your site. Though most web sites use a standard layout, you can use a more creative one to stand out of the crowd. However, remember that your layout should offer ease of navigation to your visitors and adds to the effectiveness of your site as a whole.
• Advertisements: Don’t stuff your web site with too many advertisements. Remember that the use of too many ads, wrong type of ads and poor ad placement can drive your visitors away. So, select your ads carefully and place them in such a way that they don’t interfere with the content of your site. If they do, the visitors will not be able to read the content and your objective of making money via ad clicks will be defeated.
• Easy Navigation: In order to offer a positive experience to your web site visitors, you should have easy navigation structure. A well-constructed navigation will help your visitors browse through your site with ease and find what they are looking for without any difficulty.
• Clear objective: New visitors to your site should be able to understand your business objective and the purpose of your site in quick time. You can use the “About Us” page to communicate the same. The use of a descriptive tag line to help establish your brand image is also an option worth a thought.
• Unprofessional Items: Don’t use anything on your site that creates a negative impression in the mind of your sites’ visitors. Say, the use of hit counters or animated GIFs of poor quality would do more harm than good.
• Put quality images: The use of high-quality graphics or images have the ability to enhance the site’s design manifolds. Even if you need to pay for quality images, don’t compromise or else poor quality images, which come for free, will ruin all the hard work that you have put into designing your site.
• Accessibility: Make your web site accessible to a wider audience. Don’t forget to consider various factors like users with disability, slow connections or older browsers while you ensure the accessibility of your site.
• Content of good quality: The presence of quality content on a web site plays a significant role in holding the visitors. In order to make your visitors stick to your site and encourage them to revisit, you should offer valuable and unique content to them. A first-time visitor to your site who gets valuable content to read will remember the visit. This will result him/her to return and also talk about it, thereby generating free publicity for your web site.