Website Credibility - The Critical Steps to Assure that Site Visitors Trust Your Website

The most important aspect to your website is visibility, so if your website can not get the trust of the site visitor, then all your hard work is a big waste of time.

It is common knowledge that having a website is a crusial part of marketing your business, but it is very important to know that many company websites actually do damage to the business’ image. Why? Because they are not designed well, very difficult to navigate causing them to be not user friendly, and leave the site visitor with a bad feeling about your company.

How can you boost your website's credibility?

Bay Street Branding has compiled these 10 guidelines for building the credibility of your web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research:

1.   It is important that the accuracy of the information on your site be spot on. By providing information on your site that has third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, than make sure you link to that information. Most people will not follow these links, but at the very least you have shown accuracy and confidence in your material.

2.    Proving that you are a real organization. By presenting your website as a legitimate organization, it will boost the site's credibility. By listing a physical address, you are confirming this. You can also post a photo of your building or provide a list of memberships that you have, as an example, the chamber of commerce, BBB and the like.

3.    Talk about your orangizations expertise and in the products and services you provide. Identify the experts on your team? If your contributors or service providers have authorities, then be sure to give their credentials. If you are affiliated with a respected organization, then make that known. Make sure that you do not link your site with outside sites that are not credible. by doing this, your site becomes less believable by association.

4.    Make sure you have testimonials form honest and trustworthy people, this will demonstrate that they stand behind your organization.  Next, make sure you can show the text and images from them that can stand up to the light of day. For example, some sites post customer testimonials and possibly have a comment section on your website where customers can tell their story about your organization.

5.    Making sure you put up contact information that is easliy found on your site is important. This is a simple way to boost your site's credibility by making your contact information very clear: phone number, physical address, and email address.

6.    Make sure that the design of your website looks professional. Most people evaluate your site by visual designs. When designing your website, pay attention to layout, images, consistency issues, and more. Your visual design should match the companies purpose.

7.    Make your site userfriendly to navigate . Research shows that sites win credibility points by being both useful and user friendly. Some web designers are more interested in their own company's ego and trying to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology than making sure they are creating the site for the potential customer.

8.    Making sure that you site's content is updated often (at least show it's been reviewed recently). People don't like to see a site that has content that is outdated and typically assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated.

9.   It is recommeneded that you avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, it is important to make sure you distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Most people hat pop-up ads.  Your writing style should be clear, direct, and sincere.

10.    Proof read your content.  Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site's credibility more than most people imagine. Also try to keep your site up and running with no downtime.