Website Credibility

I wanted to recommend that anyone working on a Web site take a moment to download and possibly print out page 23 of the PDF document available from the link below, and consider how it might impact your strategy for designing a Web site.

It's a study I was introduced to in graduate school a few years ago, which asked 2500 people to report on what affected their perceptions of the credibility of a Web site, and there are some interesting insights.

An excerpt from the Consumer Webwatch site:

"The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to
the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its
content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the
study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of
the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font
size and color schemes."

RESOURCES:

One of the participants, Consumer Webwatch, has a page where it can be downloaded:

http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/web-credibility-reports-evaluate-abstract.cfm

The Stanford "official" site: http://credibility.stanford.edu/publications.html

Introduction to Open Source CMS

Introduction to Open Source CMS: http://tinyurl.com/trycms

Background:

It's kind of funny. I got an email from being on an email list I signed up for at change.gov, which basically makes announcements of what the new Obama administration is going to be doing. And a day or two ago, I got excited; it was kind of hard to believe, but they said they were opening up all of their meetings to give people a chance to see what was happening, the meetings with various organizations who were presenting recommendations and ideas -- and inviting people to comment, share their own thoughts, and even share documents.

Then somehow my brain translated this into thinking that they were also asking for original ideas -- and this motivated me to pick up a powerpoint presentation I had made on open source CMS, polish it, import it into Google documents, publish it, and put it at this address: http://tinyurl.com/trycms

Then I realized they were looking for feedback on existing recommendations and proposals and whatnot. But I still think it's cool, because at least they are involving people.

Sajjil - Missile or Flower?

My first wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sajjil

It may get deleted, but I thought I should try. When I read about the new missile, I thought perhaps it should also be the name of a flower, or children's character, or something - a symbol of hope that someday we would not need to point missiles at each other. At least they waited until after Veteran's Day. They are probably nervous Bush will do something before the Obama's inauguration. Israel is nervous. I pray everyone calms down.