Website Usability

16. Ensure you add some terms and conditions on your website!

In this respect, almost always the help of a solicitor is required. Broadly speaking, terms and conditions should tackle aspects like:

• who is the rightful owner of the material promoted
• description of services
• the fact that the rightful owner is entitled to change the content published on the site
• to whom the site/ program/ service is destined
• privacy and protection of personal information
• acceptance of terms
• ownership of trade marks (different from a company to the other)

Terms and conditions should account for the services provided.

17. Make your contact email address visible

A contact email address such as "contact@xyz.com" is most of the times highly recommended in building up trust because it makes the company "xyz" appear as a sole entity.

18. Submit your site to trustful websites!

A good promotion policy is always constructive; people will certainly think higher of your website provided that it is linked or recommended by a website that they already know and they regard it as a trustful source.

19. Link external materials and sources.

Do not use information that you do not own; linking external sites will both prevent the risk of legal action and get you more traffic.

20. Promote your site in a newspaper or media support!

The effect is absolutely evident: notoriety also gets you credibility

21."Rephrase" your web site URL if needed!

Name your site after your company or even better: make a different site for every product or service you have.

22. Change your domain name if necessary

Websites with extensions such as ".com", ".org" or ".eu" are sure to be more effective in gaining more visitors.

23. Respect your customers

A satisfied client is the key to more clients; the most important asset in this consists of your positive growing popularity

24. Make your website's design appropriate for the products/services you are trying to promote!

The style of a web site should be in accordance with the product that you are trying to advertise; this discrepancy should be avoided at all costs because it is certain to lower sales.

25. Make your web pages printer-friendly

Make your site easy to print; finally, it is recommended that you put an icon at the top of the page indicating this aspect.

26. Provide your clients with live-chat!

An online discussion with someone who has a question, is again a factor which improves credibility.

27. Improve your search engine status!

This is maybe the hardest step that you have to deal with in building credibility; a high rank in search engines is quite hard to achieve due to a long and "tiring" process, which involves most of the aspects here mentioned.

28. Do not "oblige" web users to login unless necessary!

Make most of your site available to all visitors. The explanation is based on the researches which proved that sites that required logging in are not very popular (usually because of the long time taken to register for an account)

29. Make sure the content of your web site is easy to download!

Do not put information on your website that takes a lot of space; download speed is of utmost importance.

30. Links in your site must be credible.

Credibility goes like in circle: you are either linked by trustful sites or you are the one to link other sites; both ways are necessary but not sufficient.

31 Make your site usable and easy to navigate

Site usability is very important with a view to make users come back again. Ease of finding information and also good site structure make users believe more in you.

32. Post some information about the author of the site

Mentioning the biography of the site's creator might help you in gaining credibility because the visitors might realize the experience and the legitimacy with which he created the site.

33. Place a search engine on your site.

This will certainly improve the site's accessibility; the web users will find easier the information they need and will come back later again.

34. Rewrite your URLs if necessary

There are two reasons for you to rewrite your URLs. One of them is related to Search Engine Optimization; search engines are much more at ease with URLs that do not have long query strings. Secondly, the search engines can better distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords.

35."Muliply" your languages!

Make your site available in different languages in order to have more traffic.

36. Replace broken links!

A broken link, as well as spelling errors is a sign of negligence on part of the company behind the webpage.

38. Place ratings and reviews on your website

This could be a good opportunity for your visitors to give you a mark. Be careful: if remarks are rather negative, the effect will reduce your traffic.

39. Display any awards you won!

Awards are a kind of recognition of your merits which are certain to increase your notoriety.

40. Send clients emails with the transactions they made!

Users will trust this way your site more; that email will play to some extent the role of a receipt.

41. Be careful with paid subscriptions.

Researches proved that paid access to websites lead in most cases to a loss of credibility.

42. Describe your products thoroughly

Giving your clients all the information they need leads to bigger sales. Create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, in case any additional information is needed. Also make sure you provide an efficient answer to client problems.

43. Don't forget about "sense of humor"!

Even if we talk about the most serious website, one cannot forget about this issue; nevertheless, the extent to which this can be used stands for another problem.

Conclusions

All in all, like many aspects of our society, credibility is becoming increasingly important for computer products. In the not-too distant past, computers were seen by the general public as virtually infallible. Today, the assumption that computers are credible seems to be fading away.

At the same time, keep in mind that credibility is the result of a time-consuming process, which can be destroyed in the blink of an eye; once lost, credibility is quite hard to be achieved again.

The bottom line is that some of the keys of a successful business are: quality of the products/services provided and the "capacity" to keep your word, which might make the difference between you and your competitors.

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