Nowadays the modern consumer expects not only an online presence from business and brands but an optimised, well designed website (See Taylor, 2012: Building a Business Website: A Small Business Guide). This is unfortunately no longer a job that can just be delegated to the technical department as Thelwell (2000) states that website design should be viewed as a business task as opposed to a technical task due to the design needing to match the needs of the company. According to Misourri Institute of Science and Technology (2012) it takes under two tenths of a second for a visitor to form an opinion of the website and, by association, the brand itself.
Source: Do first impressions count? The power of a good website | Digital Marketing