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Is revamping your web site worthwhile?

Eugenia Y. Huang (Department of Management Information Systems, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan)

Industrial Management & Data Systems

ISSN: 0263-5577

Article publication date: 1 August 2005

830

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study how web site quality affects traffic performance.

Design/methodology/approach

An experimental design is employed to study how web quality affects traffic performance. A revamping of the experimental web site was used as the treatment, targeting visitors' perceived quality of the web site. Four traffic performance measures, page: views, visitor count, daily registrations, and average duration are tracked, and t‐tests are performed on pre‐treatment and post‐treatment data.

Findings

The analysis shows very positive responses among members; visitor count, page views and average duration increased for opt‐in and opt‐out members. For visitor count, even non‐members showed increases. However, daily registration, which measures how many non‐members become members each day, did not change. Non‐members visited more, but neither viewed more pages, nor stayed longer. Average duration is identified as the key factor for discerning visitor groups.

Research limitations/implications

The experimental web site belongs to one web site category. The generalization is subject to reasoning by practitioners.

Practical implications

It was found that: to increase membership, alternative schemes must be employed, perhaps along the lines of a non‐technical approach; to acquire more members, do not focus on converting known non‐members. Those with the same demographic profile as existing members should be targeted; and the question must be asked whether the fact that opt‐in members are stickier than opt‐out members is a trait or a consequence of opt‐in members receiving e‐mails periodically, while opt‐out members chose not to receive e‐mails.

Originality/value

With few existing traffic experiments in the literature, this study is unique, as are its implications.

Keywords

Citation

Huang, E.Y. (2005), "Is revamping your web site worthwhile?", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 105 No. 6, pp. 737-751. https://doi.org/10.1108/02635570510606978

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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