Mark Hurst wrote an intriguing piece at goodexperience.com (see link below) about community-driven websites — showing information that customers care about-vs. organizationally-driven sites-showing successive layers of expensive redesigns with competing interests of design, marketing and branding. He says it “proves an (obvious) point about branding online: the brand is the customer experience, not the colors or logos. The [organizationally-driven] site has all the “right” colors and graphics…attempting to create an emotional experience for the user.” Whereas the “[community-driven] site delivers its information in black text, on a white background, with blue text links.”

Hurst goes on to say: “enough talk about colors creating an emotional experience. When people go online to answer a question, they don’t care what color, typeface, associated graphics, or website domain is showing on the page. They just want a QUCIK and EASY experience.”

http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/001182.php