It is my understanding that if it is a secure site you should see that little lock at the bottom of the webpage. IE:

https stand for hyper text transfer protocol secur
but that doesn't mean that a http site can't be secure, the only thing that the https make is encrypt everything that is transmitted between servre and workstation.
http doesn't do this, this means that I could use a sniffer on a server and retreive username and password in their uncrypted form.
But again to put a sniffer on a server or a personnal computer, I would have to know its login password.
So really the little lock on the bottom doesn't mean that much.

But don't put any personnal info (adress, creditcard num, ...) on a site that doesn't have it.