You've got 50 milliseconds, so make it count

This week I was searching for online backup solutions at work so I did a quick Google search for and clicked 3 or 4 of the AdWords ads that appeared. One of the sites that I came across had a landing page that looked like this:

Can you see the problem here? The first thing your eye is drawn to is a sign saying "Sorry We Are CLOSED" in the middle of the page and my first instinct was to close the window and move on. I bet they are losing up to half of the visitors that they paid to see that page just because of that sign.

According to this research, web users form their first impression of your website in as little as 50 milliseconds (that's 1/20th of the second) to convince your visitors to stick around, so you better think about the first thing those visitors are going to see.