Hello, this is Mikel with Tiny Frog Technologies and we’re filming here today from Native Foods, which is one of my favorite vegetarian restaurants in San Diego and we want to talk a little bit today about building trust and credibility on a website. Establishing trust and credibility is one of the pillars of a good and effective user experience. I want to relate that to the experience someone would have when they go into a restaurant.
When someone’s choosing to go to a restaurant or when they’re walking into the restaurant, some of the things that they’ll factor into whether or not they enjoyed the experience or will come back to the restaurant is some of the things like when you walk into the restaurant, some people don’t notice this consciously, but I think a lot of people notice unconsciously the rating that the restaurant gets near the door – if it’s an A or a D or B or C. So, the rating that a restaurant has is an important factor.
Secondly, does the restaurant have good reviews. A lot of people, when deciding to go to a new restaurant, they’ll look online for reviews. So that’s an important factor in determining the restaurant and also does the restaurant have any awards or is the chef renowned if someone’s going to a more upscale restaurant. And then also if they were referred – if someone was referred to the restaurant by someone and what kind of referral did it get? What kind of experience did the previous person have?
Many of these things can correlate over to a website. Again, if a website is not establishing trust and credibility, there’s a very good chance that someone will leave your website, unless a company has a lot of brand equity like Apple or Nike or something like that people will probably not stay on the website. But if someone’s coming to your website and they’re not familiar with your business, it’s very important to establish trust and credibility early on.
So some of the things that you can consider doing are having testimonials on your website, having links to review sites like Google and Yelp and very industry-specific review sites that can be very, very helpful as well in terms of establishing trust and credibility. Just the quality of your website and the quality of the design has a big impact on establishing trust and credibility. If someone has a really bad website that’s outdated, someone will probably not have a very good interpretation of the website or impression of the company just based on the quality of the website. Another thing is if someone refers you to that website, there’s a much better chance that they’ll stay on the website.
There’s a lot of things you could do to establish trust and credibility on your website. One more thing is logos. Having client logos, especially notable companies, that show you’ve worked with established companies. A lot of people get a peace of mind when they see that on a website.
It’s very, very important when you’re putting your plan together for building a website, you have as part of that plan, establishing trust and credibility and when we work with our clients, that’s one of the key things we work with early on in the project is building a baseline of trust and credibility into the website.
If you have any questions on building trust and credibility in websites or any website related questions, definitely let us know.
