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INTRODUCTION
Large Web sites are often created by teams of developers and designers, coming from different departments and sub-organizations, representing diverse product lines. A clear example of such a large and complex corporate Web site is the Microsoft.com site. The start page (Figure 1) consists of a collection of links to subsidiary sites, which carry the information on the company's product lines. Three clicks on various links show three different subsidiary sites, all of them recognizable as belonging to the Microsoft Corporation, but also clearly distinctive from each other and from the start page. The consistent elements, such as the use of the color blue, the left hand navigation bar and the use of the logo create coherence within and between pages, and between the main site and the subsidiaiy sites.
The Microsoft Corporation has developed detailed style guides and design templates for its various subsidiary sites and guards their application, whereas at the same time a certain level of variation is intended and promoted. The umbrella organization uses this method to stress both the distinction and the affinity between the various product lines or sub-organizations (van der Geest 2000). One may wonder whether users of these pages notice the mix of consistency and variation. Do visitors of the subsidiary sites still recognize them as a site from the Corporation's family? Or are the visitors just confused, experiencing the variation as inconsistency?
VISUAL APPEARANCE AND CONSISTENCY
Visual appearance has a major effect on how users appreciate Web sites. In a large scale study of Web site credibility, Fogg, Soohoo and Danielson (2002) asked 2,684 people to rate sites and to comment on the aspects that influenced the sites' credibility. The aspect mentioned most often was the sites' visual appearance. Nearly half of all participants in the study (46.1%) referred spontaneously to visual cues, such as layout, typography, and color schemes. Regrettably, comments on inconsistent visual design were not scored separately by the researchers. But we can safely assume that inconsistent visual appearance will lead to lower credibility. Interestingly, experts scored a sub-set of the same Web sites for credibility in a parallel study (Stanford, Tauber, Fogg, and Marable 2002). The experts were far less concerned about the visual appearance of the sites than the users....