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Let your design carry the most important message of all, trust. You can’t just say that you’re trustworthy, you need to demonstrate it.  Your design is the perfect place to start proving yourself.

Words alone are not nearly enough. Appearance leaves an impression

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Make your design ignorable. When your reader visits your site, they should be able to ignore the design and focus on your content.

Bad design is much harder to ignore than good design. It’s unlikely that your reader will see past mistakes in your design. As a result, the level of trust they’ll have in the rest of your content will be virtually zero, no matter how reliable it actually is.

Templates offer great value

There are fantastic templates available that can provide a great value way of giving your website a professional, trustworthy look and feel.

You can pick a template that has many more hours poured into it than you may be able to afford. You can pick a template that has been tested and improved upon over months or even years. You can pick a template that just works.

Hidden costs of cheap or free templates

But what if somebody has had a bad experience on another website using the same template? Would that bad experience weigh negatively on you? Of course it would.

It may only take a few seconds to confirm that you are a different website but just raising the thought is enough to damage the relationship with your reader, losing trust.

Great design shows commitment and value

Templates have a lot of benefits, but investment into a unique design is an investment in credibility and trust. Spending time and money on a design is an indicator to your reader of your commitment to the website.

I’m not suggesting that everybody actually stops to calculate how long each site they visit took to build and design, but subconsciously it leaves an impression that they can trust you.

If there’s even a small error in a website design, it can make the whole site seem rushed and unimportant. No matter how long it actually took to create, it will make it seem that the owner does not value the website or their reader.

Make everything work flawlessly

If you’re going to invest in a unique design, you need to make sure that it’s a well spent investment. Everything needs to work flawlessly.

A great design will provide you with a unique looking site whilst still maintaining trust by conforming to the conventions that people have learned to expect from web pages.

• Highlight links – if something is interactive, make sure it’s obvious to your reader
• never disguise text as links – reserve the link colour for links only. If normal text appears clickable but isn’t, you’ll have a very frustrated reader.
• make your design intuitive – If you have to explain how to use something, you should probably just make it simpler to use

Finally, Test everything. Then test it again.

Pick up as many errors as you can find. Get somebody else to check as well. Different people on different computers using different software will often come up with errors you might never have been able to find.

Suggested Reading: ‘Don’t Make me Think’ by Steve Krug

‘Don’t make me think’ delivers a crystal clear, easy to understand, common sense attitude to good design principles. Read this book and follow Steve Krug’s advice and you can’t go wrong. Buy ‘Don’t Make me Think’ now at Amazon.co.uk

Coming soon

Find out how to use the right images on your website to increase trust.

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Your website needs trust before you can achieve any other goals. People are naturally sceptical of the web and rely on a set of indicators to analyse the webpages we visit; looking for credibility, value and trust.

All websites need trust. Your website may be made for the love rather than the money, and you might think you don’t need to worry about performance, about conversion rates, about growth.  But your goal should always be to create trust.

Create trust

Being trustworthy is a good start, but it’s not enough in itself.  People have a limited supply of patience when they come to your website and it’s important to identify anything that can become a drain on that supply.

• Be honest. Write clear titles, tell the reader what to expect and then deliver the expectation.
• Be clear. Avoid any misunderstanding and doubt by simplifying your message. 
• Reassure. Signal to your reader where they are and that the page contains what they were expecting.

Techniques for creating trust

Over the next few weeks I will be posting examples showing you exactly how to use images, design and words to build trust.

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Free Wireframing tool Pencil has now been updated and released a standalone application; breaking free from it’s Firefox plugin shackles.

Wireframes are an invaluable tool, letting you test – and change – layout, functionality and content specifications before investing time and money on design and build of a web project.

Pencil Project. Via Wireframes Magazine.

Titles are the hardest working pieces of writing on your site, and demonstrate perfectly why metadata deserves the title of superhero of the Internet.

The title is inevitably going to be seen many more times than the page itself. It will be seen by people who read the page, as well as those who don’t. Many readers will see the page title as a link, either on your own site or somewhere else. It’s essential that page titles make sense when used outside the context of the original page.
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It’s easy to overlook the simple fact that as a web writer, you’re also a web reader. Consider for a moment some of the last sites you visited. What format did they use to get their message across?

Were they all text only? Or did they include news feeds, videos, podcasts, photo essays, or even 140 character tweets?

As a reader, which do you find easier to use? As a writer, how many of these methods are you using to make life easy for your reader to get at your content?

Gerry McGovern recently hosted an excellent webinar looking at the work of the Microsoft Office Online team, The Need to Weed: Microsoft Office Online. A video of the webinar and the PowerPoint slides are available to download.

Microsoft realised that measuring satisfaction alone was not giving a complete picture of how well their website was performing. They started to measure the dissatisfaction of customers using their site, instigating radical changes in how they managed their site. (more…)

Visitor counts and page views do not provide useful information when analysing visitors to your site when not used alongside other details. Statistical reporting needs to involve analysis, not copy & paste.

It’s not that page view counts are not useful. But using only the page views to judge your site performance is a mistake.
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Wearing their underwear on the outside gives superheroes special powers. Everybody knows this to be true. Just as Superman keeps Metropolis safe and Batman watches over Gotham City, Metadata is busy fighting crime and saving the Internet.

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Every web page should incite an action from your reader. A strong call to action makes broswing simple and keeps objectives in focus. For each page you create, ask yourself:

• What is the purpose of the page?
• What do I want the reader to do next?
• How can I measure the success?

If you can’t answer these questions then you can’t measure the quality or success of your page. The objective of the page should be the first specification you define. After all, if the page doesn’t have a purpose, why are you planning a page at all?

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