You have the best optimized, most perfectly validated semantic website that has ever been plopped on a hosting site’s web server and you have thousands and thousands of visitors coming to your site and it’s failing to achieve its purpose!
What?????
How can that be?????
Seriously????
If you build it, they will come… right?
They might, but that doesn’t guarantee they will buy what you’re selling and when it comes right down to it, every website has something to sell. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a tangible product like jewelry, widgets or gizmos, or a brilliant idea that has the capability of eliminating America’s dependency on foreign oil (or maybe it’s just your point of view on the best way to colonize Mars); your site is there for a reason and has a specific purpose.
Ok, then what is it that’s causing my site to fail? Why are all those people coming to my site but nobody’s buying? The answer could be given in one word… Trustworthiness!
Dictionary.com defines trust as:
the reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence; and also defines trustworthy or trustworthiness as deserving of trust or confidence; reliable.
So how do you establish trust with someone you have never met, might not ever meet and from whom you would like to exchange your widget, gizmo or idea for their money or time? It’s not like you can have your mom write a letter and plaster it on your website assuring your visitors of your honesty and integrity; obvious virtues that every mom maintains an objective, realistic account of and which would stand up to the eye-to-eye scrutiny of Dr. Lightman of “Lie to me” fame. (Talk about someone who needs a crash course on personal space!) So what can you do to show the world that you’re someone they need not fear doing business with?
First, think about some of the sites you might have stumbled upon that made you hit that back button faster than Harry Potter’s Professor Snape would when landing on a site featuring a prominently displayed bottle of Pantene shampoo. What did you see or not see that caused you to leave that site in search of another one on which to spend your hard-earned yet heavily sought after money or time?
Some of the more obvious trust-busters are sites that contain poorly worded product descriptions, incomplete or missing information, unprofessional or downright lousy site design containing lots of flashing banners or popups. Another serious flaw is having little or no information on the company or person who is in effect standing with outstretched hand hoping to snag some of that valuable coinage you’ve arrived at their site with and with which you have hopes of obtaining a much needed doohickey for your poor sick mom.
Ok, so you can see what some of the things might be that you need to avoid, but telling you what not to do doesn’t really give you the information you need to have in order to build that trustworthy site. It’s akin to telling you to go look up a word in the dictionary when you have absolutely no idea how the dang thing is spelled in the first place and wouldn’t need the services of a dictionary if you did! (Didn’t you just hate it when your mom did that to you? I can still remember searching the dictionary for what seemed like hours in search of the word "alliterate"… it sure sounded like it started with an "I"!)
So without further ado let’s get to the part that leads to the treasure chest of website trustworthiness; the part which is sure to bring the vast wealth and success you dreamed of while enduring hundreds and hundreds of hours of tutelage at the hands of the brilliant instructors to whom you’ve entrusted your education. (A small nib of brown-nosing hidden amongst the pearls of wisdom could only serve to improve the “grade” ahem I mean “value” of said wisdom, right?)
Now, take just a moment and think about some of the sites you’ve visited recently that immediately instilled in you a sense of trust. What did you notice that made you feel that way? Was there something you saw or read that said “Hey, you can trust me!” … some beacon of trustworthiness that indicated your confidence in that site was sure to survive even the severest of buyer’s remorse? It probably wasn’t any one thing, but rather a combination of things.
For a site to be trustworthy, paying close attention to the following points whilst building your site will help ensure your site not only attracts multitudes of money-wielding visitors, but that said visitors will pry open their purses or at least consent to spend sufficient time on your site so as to absorb the vast amounts of wisdom contained therein.
- Domain name – your domain name should be a unique top-level domain and not part of some other company’s or entity’s site. For example widgets-r-us.com and definitely not something such as www.cox.net/widgest-r-us.html.
- Domain name email addresses – most hosting packages include POP3 email addresses or accounts such as you@widgets-r-us.com, which are much more professional than email addresses such as widgets-r-us@hotmail.com.
- Contact information – make sure your site contains information on how to contact you. Include phone numbers, email addresses, physical address if appropriate, and business hours.
- About Us page – it’s common practice for sites to contain an "About Us" page which contains information regarding yourself, your company, bios on the principals or management team, a company history, company policies and the company’s mission statement.
- Dates – Some sites contain last updated time/date indicators or copyright dates. Make sure these are updated properly and that your site shows recent activity. If the last time your site was updated is shown as three years ago, your site isn’t going to be very credible. Keep your content up-to-date and anything that dates your site must be within at least the last 30 days.
- Links – Check your site often for broken or outdated links. Nothing says “abandon ship” quicker than a site containing a bunch of broken links. Broken links raise the question “Is this company still in business or has this site been abandoned?”
- Testimonials – feature customer testimonials on your site. Ask your happy customers to provide you with feedback to use on your site. Be sure to quote the customer’s feedback accurately and get their permission to publish this on your site. Respect your customer’s privacy though and use initials for their first or last name.
- Spelling and grammar – Check, double check and even triple check all your spelling and grammar. Ask colleagues or friends to look over your site and report anything that is incorrectly spelled or worded poorly. You might even consider hiring a professional to proofread your site. Every misspelled word or error in your site results in a direct hit to your site’s perceived credibility and trustworthiness.
- Guarantees – If offering a service or product for which you charge your customers, provide some type of guarantee in the form of a refund or revision of a provided service in the event of an unhappy customer. If you don’t offer a guarantee, be upfront about it and make sure you state that information where a customer is likely to see it, not in 3 pt type buried at the bottom of your site below the footer and in the same color as the background.
- Privacy policy – it’s always a good idea to provide your customers with a page containing your company’s privacy policy or code of ethics. In most cases you’re asking them to provide you with sensitive, oftentimes confidential information and you need to let them know what you intend to do with that information.
- Secure your site – If you transact business that exchanges goods or services for money, make sure your site is secure using a secure server or secure gateway, and include information that lets your customers know their transaction is as secure as possible.
Following these suggestions will help ensure that you not only have the best optimized, most perfectly validated semantic website that has ever been plopped on a hosting site’s web server, but that it accomplishes the purpose for which it was intended.
