How your website looks is just as important to building your branding and getting your brand’s message across as the words on your website. Because consumers only give your website a fraction of a second of a chance before deciding whether or not to stay or click away, it is extremely important for your website’s design to be as high quality as possible.

Color, shape, font, line, and even white space matter when building your website. Even just a few mistakes could completely destroy all of the hard work you have done with advertising and SEO to get people to your website. And while there are people who naturally have a better eye for design, everyone can learn and understand the basic principles that make some designs very good and some designs very bad.

It is a common misconception that all you need for your website to be successful is pretty design (and there is a difference between a pretty design and a good design). A website that is just pretty is not necessarily going to function well. If your website is not highly functional it is going to have an extremely high bounce rate. Too much focus just on aesthetics and not enough focus on function is not going to work and neither is too much focus on function and not enough on aesthetics.

In order for your website to be successful, it needs to function well, look great, be easy to use, and load very quickly. There are a few simply psychology tricks that you can learn to make sure your website fits all of these criteria:

Fonts and Colors Evoke Emotion

Color and font are both very effective at evoking emotion. Color is a big part of your brand, too. You probably have already chosen colors that are going to “stand” for your brand. When you think of big names like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, you probably think of one color or a set of colors that have to do with that brand. For example, what colors do you think of when someone says the brand “McDonalds?” Red and yellow, right? Red and yellow project both the fun and energy that McDonalds wants associated with their brand.

Color is extremely important for brand recognition. Even if your website visitors do not consciously notice or remember the color associated with your brand, they will notice if that color story is not consistent across all of your brand messaging. But colors affect conversions in other ways, too. More than 85% percent of shoppers said that they picked a product primarily because of a color. You have likely been a store, seen a product that you liked, but did not buy it because they did not have a color you wanted.

How color is viewed is different across culture and gender lines. In the United States, someone wearing a long white dress is probably getting married. In other countries, white is associated with death and the color red is associated with marriage. What does this mean for your campaigns? It means that one color will not always work well for all marketing campaigns. This why, when you see someone recommending that you should change the color of a call-to-action button from yellow to green, you should carefully consider whether or not that color matches your brand and is going to work for your audience. You have to test all color changes thoroughly before jumping in with both feet.

There are certain colors that are associated with certain colors. A light, bright green, for example, is linked to trust. Dark blue often means sadness, though teal can often communicate amazement. Yellow is associated with happiness, while pink is often associated with hatred or disgust. Of course, if a color has a negative connotation, that doesn’t mean that you cannot use it. Plenty of colors use blue or pink or red and do not struggle with their customers associating that brand with anything negative.

Fonts work in the same way but their associations are a little bit more nebulous. Script fonts are often felt to express creativity or elegance. Sans serif fonts are modern and stable. Serif fonts are more traditional and give a sense of reliability.

Present Your Information in an Orderly Way

Most people recoil from disorder. Sure, some of might thrive with a messy desk, but the human race, as a whole, understands information and concepts better when it is presented symmetrically, with a very clear center. If you want your website visitors to quickly learn information, use symmetry and order to convey it. An imbalanced website is going to be difficult to look at, just as website with a bright green background and purple text is going to be difficult to look at.

One of the most important ways to use symmetry and order? To draw attention to your call to action buttons. They should be centered in the middle of the page, at the very least, as this is where they are the most likely to draw the attention of the viewer.

Give Your Visitors a Reaction

You want to immediately impress on your visitors that your website is great and that they should stay and continue to look at it. This is why aesthetics are so important. If your website is not beautiful to look at, most people will just bounce away. Why? Because they can. Because your competitors have better websites, because a website, in this day and age, that doesn’t look professionally made, is a sign of a scam business. If your website looks like it was built by an eighth grader in 2002, you need a website with modern edge.

How do you do this? Big, colorful pictures are a place to start. People love a great image, and especially with brands that are related to travel or the outdoors, big, engaging pictures of fun locations are essential to keeping people on your website.

Another way is to give your website something unique, something that they can latch on to. Maybe your website has a hidden feature that people will be searching for. Maybe your website has a very prominent feature that people will be searching for (perhaps you have heard about the “do not pull” levers on Photojojo’s product pages?). Give your website something memorable.

Make Connecting with Your Users Your First Priority

Your website should be designed with your visitors in mind. What information are they looking for when they click onto your website? How can you serve up that information in a way that they are going to respond to? There’s a reason that webpages that sell baby clothes to mothers look and operate different from webpages that sell razors and shaving cream.

Those businesses are targeting two different demographics, so the language, colors, and designs they use are going to be tailored for their target audience. If every element of your website doesn’t cater to your target audience, you are not going to get the response you need to be successful.