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02/13/2006: "Remember the old 7 Second Rule --- Well, it's Dead. Now it's a SPLIT SECOND."

Hey, you're sexy as hell. You've got it all over everyone else.

Got your interest? At least you're still here and it's been what . . . 6 or 7 seconds? Maybe eight?

For years I've been telling people that they only had 7 seconds to get Web site visitors to decide to stay or go. Well, I may have been right then. But that rule is dead.

A recent study on Web design claims that visitors to a Web site decide if they like or dislike the site in a SPLIT SECOND . . . as the site is loading. Wow. That's an eye popper.

I've known for awhile now that when I go to a site that takes forever to load I generally get the hell of there fast. Like if they use flash, which I detest, I'm gone like a lemon pie in front of a fat man who hasn't eaten for eight hours and there's no other food in the house.

This study follows along with the theory discussed in the popular book from last year, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking," which recons that people make most major decisions in a split second.

During the course of the study, which was conducted at Carleton University in Ontario and published in the journal "Behaviour & Information Technology," researchers asked subjects to view Web pages for 50 to 500 milliseconds.

The researchers found that subjects formed an opinion about a site in as little as 50 ms and that this initial split-second decision carried over into subsequent opinions about the site.

Where does the copy come in?

I've always told clients to let me write the copy first and to have the design built around the copy. I begged them to keep the design simple and navigation user-friendly and fast. Most of them prefer to do it the other way. They want big heavy graphics and grand design and the copy written to fit in. It ain't gonna' work dude.

If it's true that you've got a split second to keep that visitor, count on a damn good copywriter to give you the words to keep them. Forget the graphics. After all, drudgereport.com gets more hits than just about any other site (with only a few exceptions) and it has few if any graphics at any given time and it's ugly as hell. But it's the words that people want. It's the information, the news they are after.

So you may or may not be sexy. But if you've read this far, my opening at least got you to read this little bit of the great big Web. You didn't stay because you think I'm so great. And you sure didn't stay because this site is pretty. You only stayed because you want this information and I provided it. Keep that in mind when you're dealing with your own split second on your own Web site.

For more information about this study, click here.