I can see your eyes rolling now… come on, talk about splitting hairs!
Not really.
Things are “good” because we like them. Each individual makes up the rules for what is good and what is not as good. Its all based on personal tastes, life styles and past experiences. We can not define ART, but we know if we like it.
When you introduce the word "successful", then there needs to be a definition of what successful means, and therefore, judgment is taken away from the individual and now judged by criteria.
If you build a "good" web site, probability will tell us most will not like it, since there are more people NOT like you than there are like you.
BUT if we look at a group of people and build a site they will like, look at the difference we can achieve by a applying a set of criteria based on that user set to our web design.
No, we don’t even want to build a good web site.
We want to use good web design, good research, good visual design to make a successful web site based on our users and our goals.