USER ORIENTED WEBSITE INTERFACE Website Credibility YOU ARE HERE!

WEBSITE IA & USABILITY: WEBSITE CREDIBILITY

How to Build & Retain Trust

Gaining credibility is extremely important issue to consider when organizing and designing your website content. With impersonal nature of the Internet, it's natural that people are skeptical when it comes to online business. That's why it's very important to create a level of trust.

If your users don't find your website to be credible then all the time, effort and money spent in design and development of your site will be useless.

The obvious and all-important way to gain and retain credibility is to make your site both easy to use and useful. The online users equalize fun to success - "the more successful they were at finding information, the more likely users would call the site fun", as reported by User Interface Engineering research.

Consumer WebWatch research report revealed that average online consumers partly evaluate website's credibility on the superficial aspects of a website - the "look and feel" of a website, including visual organization, layout, typography, font size, color schemes, consistency issues, etc. "To look good is to be good", according to Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. Designing your site to look professionally will boost your site's credibility.

If you site both looks processional, and is professionally organized and designed based on information architecture principles, it would gain trust and credibility. But, relevant content and useful information are needed to retain credibility and be effective in the long run.

CONTACT DETAILS

Display contact details prominently on your site to build trust. If you're unwilling to provide contact information to your customers, why should anyone trust you enough to buy from you? You should include your street and postal address, telephone number and e-mail address. Put your contact info, or a link to it, on the top or bottom of every page. The similar effect could be achieved through a clear and prominently displayed privacy statement.

UPDATE FREQUENTLY

Update your content frequently. Realizing you are reading outdated content can be really frustrating to the users. Verify the accuracy and relevancy of your content. Include a "Last Modified" date at the bottom of the main page, or alternatively, a date at the top of a content page, to enhance its credibility.

PROVIDE REFERENCE

Provide citations and reference links to original documents and off-site sources to back up information you present on your website. It helps convincing visitors that you offer accurate information.

Use quotes - it makes your copy more interesting, while making it more respectable, as said by someone being an expert on that topic.

If you use a links section, include a short description of each site you link to, explaining why you're linking to them. That will help visitors decide whether to visit those sites or not.

Don't link to FFA sites, and low quality sites of any kind (bad neighborhood). It reduces your site's credibility and might even get you a penalty on search engines.

ERROR PROOF

Error proof your website. Any kind of errors on your site reduce credibility. Make sure your site works. Test your links. Do a spell check and a grammar check. Broken links and misspellings indicate that the site owner makes no effort to do things right.

AVOID ADVERTISING

Avoid any promotional content if possible, as well as marketing style in writing. Websites should distinctly differentiate all advertising and sponsored content from information, including "in-house" advertising.

FREE CONTENT

Offer free downloads (case-studies, white papers, etc.). If offering something to visitors with no price attached, they're more likely to trust you.

Website usability and information architecture highly influence the user-oriented website design. But, it's still NOT enough. Regardless of how well structured, easily navigable and credible a website is, users would still leave if it's not useful - relevant content-rich.

User Oriented Design & Ethical Website Marketing Strategies by Distinctia, 2006