Some marketers argue that website aesthetics are unimportant because “the only thing that matters is the strength of the content.” Don’t listen to those so-called marketing “gurus.” Website aesthetics are crucial for a number of reasons. First, people use aesthetics as a heuristic for quality; if your website is aesthetically pleasing, they’ll assume your content is above average, and vice versa. This benefit leads to a second benefit: aesthetics will influence website visitors to actually evaluate your content, a decision that’s usually made within 50 milliseconds (Lindgaard et al., 2006).
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