Determining Success for Different Website Goals

In building a successful website it is imperative that the design matches the organization’s objectives, which should be well defined. Clearly, different types of websites will have different goals. Thus, determining success across websites is both goal and context specific. One measure of website success is satisfaction, and the resulting intent to return to a website. Built on theories from the IS success and information technology adoption literatures, this study investigated four variables believed to impact website satisfaction: information quality, system quality, perceived effectiveness, and social influence. Data was collected by surveying regular users of two different websites, each from a different category within a taxonomy of websites. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to test the proposed model of website success for each studied site. The results indicate that the determinants of satisfaction and overall successfulness of websites are both context dependent and goal specific.