What Web users desire most is ease of navigation, high speed of page downloads, a clean and simple design, functionality and a site always being live;

Is it style? Design? Or is it speed that helps a website shine among the rest? If you want to know what the recipe for perfection is, you can now plug your website into a formula.

Rackspace Managed Hosting has just released the first in a series of commissioned reports examining what users desire most from a site. The Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) – an independent, non-profit research organization – carried out the investigation using participants in the United Kingdom.

After months of in-depth interviews, in-house qualitative research, a representative online survey of 2,500 adults and a virtual treasure hunt – requiring 50 people to seek out specific pieces of information from different websites – SIRC discovered a mathematical constant, which gave rise to a formula:

Pwebsite = { ((14.14* EaseNav) + (13.56* Speed) + (13.11* CleanDes) + (10.89* Func) + (10.89* Up)) - ((12.63* Pops) + (10.32* Ads) +(5.21* MultiM)) } / 6.26

What does it all mean? After analyzing the national survey and in-house evaluations, several factors became very clear to SIRC researchers. What Web users desire most is ease of navigation, high speed of page downloads, a clean and simple design, functionality and a site always being live; excessive, aggressive advertising is a definite detractor.

Two parts make up the formula, with the first containing positive features, along with specific weights obtained from the study. The second part contains negative elements, again weighted according to how significant they are felt to be. Within the formula, Pwebsite represents the degree of perfection of the website. The other variables are:

EaseNav = ease of navigation
Speed = the speed at which pages load
CleanDes = clean and simple design
Func = functionality
Up = the site is always alive
And:
Pops = the site tries to give you pop-ups
Ads = excessive advertising
MultiM = Flash and other multimedia

To score a perfect 100, a website must obtain 10 out of 10 on the first 5 variables and 0 out of ten on the second 3 variables. For sites where security is an issue, the variable ‘Secure’ with a weight of 9.77 becomes a part of the formula, causing the total to be divided by 7.24 instead of 6.26.

Rackspace Managed Hosting developed an online calculator using the SIRC criteria to measure performance against the perfect website formula, which can be found at http://www.rackspace.co.uk/rateYourSite/.

Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director for Rackspace Managed Hosting, says the formula is the first of its kind, because it comes from an objective and completely independent source that studied the views of 2,500 representative citizens. Rackspace also says the data and formula are significant because they do not come from biased “techie” magazines or design gurus.

The Web hosting company’s purpose behind developing the formula was to uncover how important uptime and speed truly are. The results were somewhat surprising.

“The research really let us in on what people want out of a website… with a couple of surprises,” Torlini said. “We didn’t realize how anti Flash people were or how unfocussed people are on cleverness of design. What’s important is how clear and simple sites are, and that they’re available right away for people.”