Why is website credibility important?
Credibility is crucial if you want to make money with your web site. Your web site visitors must have trust in your company. It's pointless to spend a lot of work on getting visitors from search engines if these visitors don't convert to sales. The Stanford guidelines for web credibility:
- Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
- Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
- Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
- Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
- Make it easy to contact you.
- Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
- Make your site easy to use -- and useful.
- Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
- Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
- Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.