E-business web sites designing

Corporations are constantly working to maintain an image of trust worthiness and quality. They use various marketing tools to impact upon consumers. Kuzic and Dawson (2004) in their paper discuss how the quality of a company’s website impacts on the overall image of the company especially among those who were studying or working in the area of information systems. They investigated which features of a website most impact upon the user experience and image of the corporation. They sampled a large number of students and concluded that factors such as “the ability to enter the site without having to download software; quick to download web pages; as well as easily readable, clear and easy to understand web pages” were among the highest ranked features. It is obvious that the downloading of software to view a website has a significant impact on the user experience. Therefore it is imperative that when a corporate website is designed that no coding or software should be embedded that may require the user to download additional plugins for their browser.

Designing a website for community interaction is somewhat different than designing for other forms of websites. Feller (2000) discusses the design of Community web site; he mentions three aspects of the community design process that impact on the usability of the site. They are “the interface for registering”, “the interface for contributing” and “the interface for consuming”. The registration interface will be vital as it will be the difference between getting members and not getting members. The interface must be well labeled and not collect any unnecessary information. Privacy is a vital issue here as, “as with the purchase mechanism, it is important the customer respects the customers’ privacy” (Feller, 2000). Paid dating sites are good examples of how clean easy to use web pages attract registrations. The match signup page requires minimal information and is very easy to use, it has drop down boxes to minimize the users effort. Its imagery and slogans tell us what the website is about in an instant. Its registration system is an example of what Maguire (2004) calls “staged obligation”, the potential client is drawn in by being asked for just a small piece of information at the beginning before more information is required on further pages. Contrasting this is the huff duffer sign up page. They approach the concept from a new more creative perspective; however they forget to ask for a confirmation of both password and email address and require all information to be typed.