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.