A Canadian study says it takes our brain less than a second to make a decision about the look of a web page. We make a judgement as fast as we can blink.

The judgement we made about aesthetics -  the branch of philosophy dealing with beauty and tastes ( emphasizing the evaluative criteria that are applied to art; traditional aesthetics assumed the existence of universal and timeless criteria of artistic value).
Once our brain has decided we like the ‘look’; we like to be right, or remain right so we are likely to rate the content favourably and keep using the site, simply because it’s natural to reinforce initial impressions. Researchers found that quick first impression didn’t change even after a more detailed evaluation.

The Canadian team showed volunteers glimpses of websites, lasting for only 50 milliseconds.

The volunteers then had to rate the websites in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

The researchers found that the speedily formed conclusions closely tallied with opinions of the websites that had been made after much longer periods of examination.

Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and lead researcher of the paper expressed her surprise at the results.

“My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” she told the website of the Nature journal, which reported the research.

The judgements were being formed almost as quickly as the eye can take in information.

In other words, the study says we make present and future decisions about a blog in about a twentieth of a second.  So all the rants I’ve done about cluttered blogs are my halo effect.:^)