Designed for Success – Empirical Evidence on Features of Corporate Web Pages

We investigate how eight concepts derived from the media characteristics of the WWW impact corporate success in E-Business if implemented as features of companies’ web sites. We construct a path model for testing our research hypotheses on three subsets of a representative survey of 1,308 cases, 469 general-, 215 which target businesses (B2B), and 224 companies which target consumers (B2C). We find that information- and functionality richness as well as keeping the site up to date are the key drivers of success for general companies. The key success factors for B2B-companies appear to be the interactive character of the site as well as keeping it up-to-date. B2C-companies can increase their success in E-Business if their web sites show content from a variety of media as well as if they are easy to navigate and readily accessible.