Design for trust
17 Feb
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.

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.

