Keys to creating a successful site.

The Trust Factor

Everything flow from trust. Successful sites treat their users with respect. Users are risking their time when they are spending it looking at your site, submitting personal information, or actually making a transaction.

Your site needs to be visually consistent with your customer's expectations. The information needs to be current and reilable. If you are including eCommerce, all of the costs need to be set out front. And whatever you do - it needs to work.

When customers encounter technical difficulties at a site, their reactions are:

• 29% continued loyalty (user tries again later)
• 52% split loyalty (found a different site: and may come back some other time)
• 19% abandon the site forever

Content

Without useful information and a clear purpose, your site is a complete waste of time. Visitors will not spend any significant amount of time browsing through a site without helpful content, and will not return often, if at all. If your site has product photos, it should have good shots of all products. Haphazard, random content signal a brittle service.

Clear navigation shows respect for customers and an implied promise of good service. Typos or difficult navigation show disregard for the users.

Load Time

Generally, users will not wait more than 15 - 20 seconds for a page to load. A common mistake designers make is creating pages that are designed for high-bandwidth users, alienating the vast majority of visitors who still rely on a dial-up modem.

How your site uses technology, from encryption to download speed also matters: users feel that a responsive website can be trusted more than one that feels like it could break at any time.

Ease of Use

A common mistake made by web designers today is creating pages that are so complicated and unorganized that visitors cannot understand and navigate throughout the site. Using bleeding edge technology, and complicated layouts can alienate visitors before they even begin to browse a site.