First Impressions Matter . . . Except When They Don’t

First Impressions Matter . . . Except When They Don’t

First impressions matter. You land on a website with pictures of snowcapped mountains, lush green forests, and cloudless skies with a headline, “Safeguarding the Planet for You and Future Generations.” You conclude it’s from some environmental group. Only the congenitally suspicious among us will automatically assume that it’s a logging-industry site scamming us while ravaging the landscape.

Welcome to how public policy plays out on the internet, where a little dose of suspicion isn’t such a bad thing.

On nearly every issue—climate change, food regulation, charter schools, private prisons, mass transit, minimum wage, immigration, public transportation, you name it—myriad forces work overtime to sway our minds and gain our vote. For each of these issues, millions of dollars hang in the balance. With so much at stake, coming up with a slick website with high-definition images and multicolored graphics is child’s play.

First impressions can steer us wrong in the other direction too. You land on a site that looks like it was designed in the early 2000s, back when MySpace was the internet’s cool place to be. But a barebones website doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem with the organization behind it.

Figure 2.3 Landing page for the Against Malaria Foundation (www.againstmalaria.com)

Take the website of the Against Malaria Foundation. Not only does it look like it’s in need of a makeover—it’s a dot-com to boot. Turns out that the Against Malaria Foundation is a philanthropic organization that has won awards for its work eradicating malaria in Africa. For whatever reason, the organization has decided that buying more mosquito nets takes priority over upgrading its website.