Effective commercial web site design: an empirical study

This paper reports a survey study involving 117 e-commerce customers. The purpose of the study was to sample the opinions of commercial web users in order to determine the critical design features of an effective web site. The results indicate that an effective web site design must have short download time, must be easy to navigate, use graphics that do not take too long to load, use animations that are not distracting, and must be highly interactive. In addition, an effective commercial web site design must be careful with the use of frames, choice of grammar and color combination and shows high degree of cohesion and consistency throughout the pages. The results also indicate that design features make a significant different on volume of traffic, repeated visits and intention of a visitor to stay and explore the site.