You Will Be Judged Mighty Webmaster

January 20, 2006 by

Pastor Jeff Hamilton of The Cornerstone Foursquare Church points us to a study released about the amount of time someone spends looking at a web site before making a judgment that will influence the rest of their experience on the site.

Just count to one-twentieth of a second and you’ll understand how quick this process is. Yep, 0.05 seconds is all it takes according to the study.

Because design is subjective, it is difficult to reduce behavior down to a prescriptive set of guiding principles when creating your site. However, it may not be a bad idea to test your site out on random group of people (not just those that go to your church) and flash designs in front of them to see which ones engage.

Post By:

Brad Abare


Brad Abare is the founder of the Center for Church Communication. He consults with companies and organizations, helping them figure out why in the world they exist, why anyone should care and what to do about it.
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5 Responses to “You Will Be Judged Mighty Webmaster”

  • Fernando's Desk
    January 20, 2006

    Wow, Talk About Thin-Slicing

    In the book Blink Malcom Gladwell discssed the idea of “thin-slicing” to describe the way experience teaches to make complex judgements and assesments in a short space of time by being attentive to patterns and impressions. Often these ju…


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  • Kent Shaffer
    January 23, 2006

    This is an excellent reason why webmasters should be well versed in the principles of marketing as well as design. USA Today ran an article about a study conducted by Glamorgan University Business School in Wales about web design preferences by gender. It is worth the read for web professionals.


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  • Frank Johnson
    January 23, 2006

    On the other hand, here’s a good counterpoint to the study in question (especially the part about CraigsList):
    http://tinyurl.com/88u5o


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  • D. Goodmanson
    January 24, 2006

    I know a group of designers are getting together to come up with site to showcase church website designs at csschurch.com


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  • c chatt
    February 12, 2006

    Just one mans opinion here, but I believe there are 2 types of sites entertainment and informative. When I visit my churches web site I am looking for information not a 10 second flash entry, I wish that more churches/evangalist understood this. I believe that if Churches leveraged the web like they do TV the internet would be a less hostile environment


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