Making Your Site Look Credible for First Impressions

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

Categories: Web Design

We all do it, we’ve all been trained to do it. We’ve come to acknowledge what a good, credible website should look like and what a bad, fake website should look like. Whether your site looks good or bad can mean the difference between a visitor that stays 5 seconds or 50 seconds or money for your business.

As an example, I was looking over the shoulder of a not-so-computer-literate associate who, upon visiting a domain name parking page, hit the Back button almost instantly. It was almost second nature for them. Although they wouldn’t be able to clearly tell me why they did it or the characteristics that made it seem fishy, there is something to learn here.

Take for example this domain name parking page that I stumbled upon when mistyping one of my regular websites: DiggMirror.com (the indended URL is DuggMirror.com) and analyze it. What can we learn from this page? When compared with websites we visit every day, what could boost this site’s credibility? The site design isn’t purely CSS and it does have a supporting image, but what are things the web designer can do to boost its credibility?

Boosting Your Site’s Credibility

Your Identity
Possibly the most important part of your website. If your identity is represented by a handful of letters typed in an <h2> tag, it looks sloppy and poor. In the example, even though there was a little font manipulation done to the wordmark identity (bold, arial), it simply pales in comparison to a logo or a wordmark set in a not-so-common font that’s been anti-aliased.

Readable Content
Content is one thing you might not be able to identify. Typical link farm (and domain name parking) websites are often mass-produced and its creators simply don’t have time to create or find content to put on each and every one of them. Its content is typically dynamically generated and it shows. Take the time to draft content related to your topic. Even if it takes a substantial amount of time, it will be worth it.

Default Colors, Fonts, etc. are Bad
Even if the defaults mesh extremely well with your design or your color scheme, do your best to stay away from default colors, this includes:

Blue links, purple visited links
Sixteen point Times New Roman body text
Unstyled headers
Non-CSS borders on tables

Quality Design
This is also one of those things, the typical person won’t be able to iterate what good design looks like, but they’ll know it when they see it. If you’re a person who’s not particularly into design, visit sites whose design you enjoy and whose design you don’t. Note the differences or try your best.

It’s hard to explain, but I wrote articles with Web Design tips. Part 1 & Part 2.

That’s all for now. Hope that helps.