One shortcut to success is to determine what successful people do and try to do the same. Some times this is referred to as "modeling." If you wanted to succeed in business you could model your behaviors after Ben Franklin or Andrew Carnegie. If you wanted to succeed as a Scientist you could model Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison. If you wanted to succeed as a politician you could model Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Or I guess for almost anything you could just model after Ben Franklin.
If you are trying to put together a web site, you should check out the web sites of those who are successful in your business. I would not necessarily incorporate every element that is in every competitor's web site. Some of these sites might be quite bad.
In looking at the internet as a whole you could look at what common characteristics are shared by the most successful web sites. First you must understand that a successful web site is hard to measure. The most available measure we have is popularity. This indicates how many visitors have viewed the site. Just because a site is popular does not necessarily mean that it is profitable. In fact some very popular web sites are owned by unprofitable companies.
Regardless, you can find a list of the most popular web sites. Some of these statistics are a little misleading. Some of these sites are software companies or various internet services. A visitor may not have actually gone to this site but got a hit from this site while his or her software was being loaded. Many "popular" sites are companies that process web statistics. They get a hit not from someone visiting their site, but anytime a client site is viewed by a visitor and the statistical scripts are triggered.
All that being said here are a few of the most popular web sites. I have not included a complete list. And I have not included any sites that my wife would not want me to look at.
The full list can be found at alexa.com
Now we could do some analysis about what these sites have and do not have. I will just consider a few characteristics.
| Site | Background | Font |
| Yahoo | white | arial |
| MSN | blue | unknown |
| white | arial | |
| Ebay | white | arial, verdana |
| Microsoft | blue | unknown |
| AOL | white | unknown |
| Amazon | white | verdana, arial, helvetica |
| CNN | white | unknown |
From this you could decide that these companies have determined the most effective background is white. One of them prefers a blue background, but white a white background behind a majority of the content. You could also conclude that these companies have determined that Arial and Verdanna are the most effective fonts to use.