Kieran Lal's blog entry led me to find this article which summarizes some interesting survey results:
A 2002 Stanford University study on Web credibility, which included a special look at the financial services industry, reveals that consumers place more emphasis on “design look” and “information design” than on “content evaluation.” This is the opposite of what those working in the industry think. Further, the study went on to reveal that “design look” received the most comments from consumers in all categories as a sign of Web credibility—46.1%, almost twice as many mentions as the next category. Visual design is every bit as important as usability, findability, and accessibility. It is perhaps even more critical in swaying the perception of today’s more Web-savvy site visitors.
With this in mind I am thinking about the usability of this site, softwaremanagers.org. I have been focused on providing more features and not modified the default theme much. Examples from some of the Digital Web Magazine articles referenced include the very "usable" but boring banking sites like CitiBank 
contrasted with this well designed example from BankWest. 
One barrier is the insistance of the Drupal core team's (correct but annoying) reliance on CSS and semantic markup. Right now theme designers must navigate quite a few obstacles and files to provide a unified look and feel for a Drupal (or CivicSpace) site such as this one. I'm working on coming up to speed on the philosophy used in developing themes. Like many aspects of Drupal I find my expectations exceeded in some ways and barely met in other ways.
My request is simple: if you have comments regarding this website, please let us know. As a preview, our list of things we would like to change already includes changing the orange & gold color scheme for links, making inline images show up better than in this blog post and working with categories in a better way.
