Be active or stay unattractive : Be active or stay unattractive

Sammanfattning: Enterprises utilize information and communication technology, including websites, to market themselves and expand their businesses. However, employing this technology is not always a guarantee of success, especially for small enterprises. This is often due to limited resources and to the extent of having web skills present within the enterprise. Deciding who will design the website for a small enterprise is therefore of importance since a well designed website is a requirement to attract interest in visitors. The design of a website is also a main factor for the first impression to a visitor, a website that is visually appealing tends to give a greater confidence at first glance. This thesis is based on the interest of small enterprises considerations about what website design development characteristics and objective characteristics is generating more positive first impressions. To find this out, interviews together with subjective and objective measures of visual aesthetics were conducted to immerse in the aesthetics of small enterprise websites. The methods implemented gave variables to test in a correlation analysis. This correlation analysis showed that two web development characteristics had strong correlations with users' perception of visual aesthetics. None of the objective aesthetic attributes based on previous theories gave any strong correlations. These characteristics were therefore supplemented with other objective characteristics, which gave two strong correlations.