Components of a Successful Website

What does a successful website look like? We're not talking about the design or layout, but rather the structure. What sort of components do "good" websites share?

We separate these components into the Visible and the Invisible. In other words, what the casual visitor sees, and what is going on behind the scenes, or under the hood.

EContent today published their EContent 100 List of Companies that Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry. You can see us right here under Open Source Matters along with other notable open source friends like Drupal and Wordpress. The EContent 100 winners will be honored at the Buying & Selling eContent Conference next April 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ.

There are a variety of categories: classification & taxonomy; collaboration; content commerce; content creation, production, & digital publishing; content delivery; content management; content security; fee-based info services; intranets & portals; mobile content; search engines & technologies; and social media.

EContent said, "We are proud of this list and of the companies on it. Members of the EContent 100 List are the companies empowering the content that fuels business today. We hope that our readers find the list as valuable as we did the process of creating it." The Joomla Project is honored to be recognized as a high-calibre business solution.

25 things that may surprise you

1. People are more likely to look at banners that appear at the top of a page
2. Viewers spend more time looking at images that contain more than one face
3. People tend to click more often when specifically invited
4. People tend to click on text links that are embedded in content more often than graphical images and banner advertisements
5. Users are more likely to search for ?used Lexus? rather than ?pre-owned Lexus?
6. Most people can't remember more than seven things at once
7. Research shows that web readers scan pages before they read anything, meaning they may scan right past your article if it doesn't jump out at them
8. External links enhance the credibility of a site
9. Most buyers complete their purchase-related search engine research two or more weeks before they buy
10. Pop-up ads generate a click-through 13 times that of the standard 468 x 60 pixels banner and a conversion rate more than 14 times better
11. Extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users
12. Ads offering product discounts and coupons are more attractive to users than those offering chances to win merchandise, cash, points towards purchases, or airline miles
13. Seventy-eight percent of click-throughs from Google listings to e-commerce Web sites come from Google?s editorial or algorithmic search results
14. Click-throughs from Overture paid listings convert better and generate higher revenues than those from Google?s paid search listings
15. A number one listing gets three times the click-through rate of a number two listing
16. Users are less likely to fill out a form if it has more than 10 questions
17. People are more likely to read a headline that is followed by a blurb
18. Seventy percent of Spanish-speaking users are more likely to read news and current events online, compared to 51 percent of non-Spanish speaking users
19. The top five search terms of all time are: Pam Anderson, Dragonball, Pokemon, Britney Spears, and WWE
20. The three-click rule states that any page in a site should be accessible in three clicks
21. The 7 ? rule states that a user should never be presented with more than five to nine choices at any given point in the site
22. The average user will click 12 times before leaving a site
23. Saturdays and Wednesdays are the most popular day of the week to surf the Web
24. Only 11 percent of email newsletters were read thoroughly
25. Twenty percent of Americans admit to buying products from spam