For those of us who may not have a clue about how to begin designing a website.  The following video provides some basic, beginning information on HTML markup and web site design.

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What does a crappy website look like, and how can you tell?  For starters, if you can’t figure out what the website is about within 2-3 seconds of being on the landing page, that alone should start sending up red flags.

We are all analysists

Believe it or not, we are all analysts in our own right.  Every time we use a search engine to look up a web page where we are searching for a specific piece of information, we are constantly looking and evaluating the quality of what is present before us.  According to Consumer Reports WebWatch Investigations,

…2,684 people evaluated the credibility of two live Web sites randomly assigned from one of 10 content categories (e-commerce, entertainment, finance, health, news, nonprofit, opinion or review, search engines, sports, and travel.) A total of 100 sites were assessed.

What the study found was that most people failed to pay attention to the credibility of the sources of information on websites.  Rather, as the 2002 study indicated:

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.[source]

So, should we be alarmed by this information?  You bet.  While reading through a person’s website may be interesting, to say the least, we really need to evaluate what we’re looking at.  It’s one thing to sift through a site for aesthetic reasons, but when you’re actually referencing information from a particular website, wouldn’t you like to know where they got their information from?

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