How to keep up the appearances on the Internet

Website essentials

The first impression of your website, which is formed within the few first seconds, is utmost important on the Internet.
Depending on the source of study, the type of website and the type of audience, these first few second is between 50msec and 7 seconds.
Additionally visitors of websites have certain expectations and find features evident. If you don’t fulfill these minimal expectations or provide the website essentials, your visitors will already decrease subjectively the value of your website and even your company.

One of these website essentials is the favicon (favorite icon) that you see preceding the domain name in your browser or in the bookmarks and history of the sites visited.
Having a favicon probably doesn’t bring any significant additional tangible value. However not having a favicon on your website will give the impression of a less professional website. A less professional website implies or suggests a less professional company.
Keeping up the appearances is utmost important on the Internet as for Miss Bucket to be called ‘Bouquet’.

Favicon benefits

Although no real tangible benefit can be attributed, still some benefit improvements can be expected:
- Helping your website standing out better.
- Adds a professional touch to your website.
- Improves branding.
- Create awareness.
- Adds credibility to your website.
- Easier retrieval of your website in a long list of bookmarks and history list.

The favicon design issues

The main problem is that in a tiny space with limited pixels (16×16 or 32×32) you need to make an impression, an indication of functionality or a statement and it has to be recognizable.

We started out with ‘LE’ in upper case as the name LEADSExplorer consists of 2 parts: ‘Leads’ and ‘Explorer’.
However nobody will know what ‘LE’ stands for as it has no meaning. Having still space available on the 16×16 square, we decided to add on ‘ADS’ so this would read ‘LEads’. This makes a very clear statement indicating the website is about ‘Leads’.

For the corporate Engago Technologies Ltd. website we wanted to express the ‘engage’ in the name. An indication of movement should be expressed by the favicon. In order to do so we used a few parallel lines that increase in distance and an arrow pointing upwards.

Keeping up the appearances is important on the Internet not immediately for increasing sales or improving business, but in order not to miss business.

How well do you keep up the appearances on the Internet ?

This blog posts counts as Prior Art proof for the LEADSExplorer favicon as it gets distributed over the Internet into several data bases.