Your website can be your business’ greatest asset or its biggest liability, depending on how well you understand the relationship between visual aesthetics, usability and sales. Digital marketing leader OneUpWeb has released a new study that breaks down the keys to success in today’s ultra-competitive environment.

The white paper, Revolutionizing Website Design: The New Rules of Usability, reveals the new standards in website form and function and shows how they directly affect sales. To identify the formula for building balanced websites that deliver maximum returns, OneUpWeb evaluated 100 sites across four different industries: e-commerce, business-to-business, travel and hospitality, and higher education.

Among the findings on which they based the report were the following:
•    E-commerce websites had a 45-percent task failure rate
•    Participants in the study were “skeptical” of companies whose sites lacked professional-quality design, regardless of the ability to navigate those sites
•    Travel and hospitality sites received the lowest user-experience ratings of the four industries

Follow the above link to download the free report and determine if your design is driving customers to or away from your business.