A long time ago when I first started developing business web applications, my wife asked me about how things were going at work. I told her that one of the biggest challenges with our development team was making sure that our web applications were user friendly and intuitive. She shakes her head, turns to me and says "A website can't be intuitive!" When I asked why, she said it's because a website can't think or gain perception ... which is true, but my response was that it can help the visitor of that website to that.
For the next 30 minutes or so, we went back and forth on ways a website could or could not be intuitive. We finally looked up the meaning of the word intuition, and finally came to an agreement on what it means for a website to be intuitive ... "immediate apprehension". The websites that are able to provide a good user experience (UX) are able to help the visitor know exactly what the site is about and how to get the information they need quickly. We've all been to websites where we couldn't find anything, left, and never came back - confusion leads to visitors going somewhere else for products, services and/or information; and with business solutions, it leads to an application not being utilized.
So if confusion leads to the failure of a website, the opposite must also be true ... understanding leads to the success of it - which means more repeat visitors, more utilization, more revenue, or whatever the goal of your website is ... and the quicker they can understand what your website is doing the better. But I believe the days are gone where it is acceptable to simply throw a website together without any thought and expect people to automatically "buy into" what you're doing. Having a website is not enough, because the assumption in most industries is that you have; having a website that is intuitive is what will set you apart from the others.