When a brand new visitor stumbles onto your website they’re going to decide within a matter of seconds whether or not they’re going to stick around.

It’s vital to create a powerful first impression if you plan on keeping your visitors at your site. For that matter, if you want your regular visitors to remain regular visitors then you’ve got to maintain a site that’s well organized, easy to navigate and fun to interact with.

Here’s a collection of 8 great tips to help you get started in creating a powerful first impression on your website or blog.

1.  Clean up that messy sidebar

Most people use their sidebars as the catch all for anything they find on the internet that happens to be labeled as a widget.  This day in history?  Put it in the sidebar.  My astrological fortune?  Put it in the sidebar.  My pet cat’s latest tweets?  Put it in the sidebar.

But good sidebars aren’t built like that.  Effective sidebars support the focus of your website.  They provide information and links that build your site’s overall theme.

In other words, if the widget has nothing to do with the rest of your site then get rid of it.  Put items in your sidebar only if they make sense with the rest of your blog.  Get that sidebar cleaned up.

2.  Choose a font we can read

If your users are squinting to read your material then you can count on the fact that they’re probably not going to stick around for very long.  Since our fonts are carrying the actual content of our blogs, it’s vital that they provide the support necessary to really bring the readers in.

Here’s four principles to guide you in selecting the fonts for you blog:

• Get rid of the ‘Times New Roman‘ family of fonts.  Serifs are out.  Pick something that’s easier on the eyes like Calibri, Tahoma or Arial.
• Use a large, comfortable font-size and provide space between each paragraph.
• Keep the font style the same across all of your pages.
• If you use different fonts for headers and titles then limit the number of fonts site wide to only 3 or 4.  Any more and it will be a distraction to the reader.

3.  Optimize your post footers

If you have a visitor that just read one of your articles and enjoyed it then what would you like for them to do next? Regardless of your answer to that question, optimizing your post footer is the key to achieving it.

I have five specific things that I would like my users to do after reading an article and you can see these five options at the bottom of every post at Site Sketch 101. I recommend that you develop something similar to this.

• View and read other similar articles.
• Subscribe to updates via either RSS or Email.
• Use a social bookmarking site to share the article.
• Visit an advertiser’s website.
• Contribute feedback in the comments section.

You can see that I have my post footers designed specifically to support these five goals.

4.  Learn how to create emphasis

There are certain things on your site that you may choose to draw more attention to than others. Whatever it is that you may be trying to accomplish at your site, you can accomplish it more effectively by learning to place emphasis on it.  You can do that by placing links above the fold, by making them larger or bolder than that surrounding features and by making them very clear and easy to navigate for the user.

We all want to get more subscribers at our websites so let’s explore this concept using our subscription links as an example.

If you want to make it easy for your users to subscribe to your website, I recommend that you find a large RSS icon that matches the overall look of the site and that you place it on several parts of your website. You should place one in the header, one in the sidebar, and one in the footer of each post.

If you can prominently display your subscription options in a classy, non-overbearing way then your readers will be led to click through and subscribe to your feed.

5.  Overhaul with a whole new theme

Of course, if you’ve already tried everything else and you still can’t seem to come up with something that you and your readers really fancy then you can also install a new theme altogether.  Sometimes a fresh start with a new template is the perfect way to create a buzz around your site.

Need help picking out a new template?  Check out these premium templates and template clubs to help you get started.

• Elegant Themes – $20/Year: Elegant Themes offers one of the best WordPress themes club available online at one of the lowest possible prices.  It’s no wonder this is one of the fastest growing template clubs.
• Woo Themes – $125/Year: Woo Themes may cost a bit more than my first recommendation, but it’s also my theme club of choice.  I use a Woo Themes template right here at Site Sketch 101.
• Theme Forest – As low as $25/Template: With Theme Forest, you’re given an entire marketplace with 100′s of premium themes for WordPress, Joomla and other content management systems.

For more theme ideas check out the bottom of the sidebar.  I have a bunch of themes and theme clubs listed down there that are worth checking out.

Group Reflection

There are actually a lot of things that we can do to pump up the visual appeal of our websites.  What other elements and principles can help us out with this?  Which of the five listed above do you think will be the biggest help to you?