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The field of electronic commerce is registering significant and sustainable growth in the U.S.A. In its earlier days, creating a website focused on providing information about the company and its products/services. Today, it is more about a place to conduct business and to develop long term relationships with customers. In the United States alone, there are over 210 million users of the Internet; this equates to almost 70% of the population. Worldwide, over 1 billion people are surfing the (World Internet Usage, 2007) the millions of websites on the Web (http://www.websiteoftheyear.co.uk/winners.php).
Clearly a website is an interface between an organization and its stakeholders such as customers, financial community, suppliers, etc. The interface is strategically important so as to gain a competitive advantage both locally as well as globally. As a consequence, a few studies have attempted to determine how consumers evaluate websites. However, little is known about that those who actually create, operate, and maintain the website operations think regarding the key issues of website design. Although, consumers’ opinions are important, we believe it is equally important to seek the opinion of the professionals in the field regarding the factors they think make or break website operations. For most establishments, it is too difficult or cost prohibitive to seek the opinions of consumers. As a result, companies are forced to rely on the expertise of the Web designers. For example, in a survey of small and medium size businesses over 80% sought assistance of the Web designers and developers outside their organizations before activating their websites (Eisammani, Hackney, Scown, 2004).
Thus, this study fills an important void in the existing literature. This void is filled by (1) surveying the professionals in the area of website design and development, (2) polling a national sample of Web designers and developers instead of using convenience samples of past studies, and (3) building upon past exploratory studies by focusing on the factors reported to be significant in more than one study.