the Social Issues Research Centre has investigated what factors make for the 'perfect website'. The task of the Rackspace research was to ask: among all the 'Web 2.0' era hype, are websites and home pages better designed in 2006 than they were in the past? Is the customer / content-provider king? Are (over)design, (over)branding, unwanted advertising and non-existing links still the order of the day? What has the learning curve of the last 15 years taught designers and ISPs among others, about what the customer demands from an 'ideal' website? What do we want from websites? What factors do we value as most important? Speed? Substance? Style? Function?

These days of course, we like to have a formula for such things and one of our aims was to calculate a formula for the 'perfect website'. We wanted a formula based not on the opinions of editors of tech magazines or web design gurus, but on the views of 'end-users' (that's us: the man and woman on the street). The resulting formula (on page 13) is based on the views of the 2,500 representative citizens polled in our national survey and the participants who took part in our own in-house website evaluation tasks.