According to the study:

"...nearly half of all site evaluators (46.1%) used visual cues, such as the site's overall design or look, to assess a site's credibility. This happened slightly more frequently with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%) and travel (50.5%) categories, and less frequently with the health (41.8%) and news (39.6%) categories."

Ahh! but the kicker is... some really slick looking sites received negative comments such as "It looks like it's designed by a marketing team, and not by people who want to get you the information that you need." This means you definitely want to keep away from having a site designed that is too brochure like and make sure it is engaging to the visitor.

Since they found that looking good is often interpreted as being good and being credible, an evaluation of your site now, might mean you can budget for a re-design in 2005. Even if it just means removing dated content, checking to make sure links are functional, and to give it the over-all appearance that everything is current.

When I was so busy with my website that sold advertising to used car dealerships, I fell behind a bit in keeping this website updated. Some of the content was dated, some of the links were bad, and things looked stale. I received a number of nasty comments by email, and had people making jokes about my site that were posted to my discussion forum. I felt a bit offended by this, but... thanks to the negative comments it prompted me to re-design the site and get it back on track.

The result has been a lot more traffic and business.