Top Dog Strategy

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The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made. —George Burns If George Burns had been a Web developer, he might have quipped something similar about Websites and credibility. After all, with so many sites out there and so many of them bad, your site can really stand out if it just SEEMS a little credible. It's probably easiest to seem credible when you actually ARE, but at the very least you can try hard to fake it. Faking credibility is not what this is about, though—this is really about first impressions and knowing enough about how people form them so that your visitor's first impressions will be positive. Just as we judge people on first impressions so strongly that they sometimes can never overcome them, visitors judge our Web sites within moments of landing on them, and one of the most important judgments they make is about our credibility. They swiftly decide on the basis of surface characteristics whether the content of your site will be sufficiently reliable for then to stick around. If they decide it's not, they're gone. As you can imagine, commercial interests (that may include you) are very interested in getting people to stick around on their Web sites, and so in understanding how people form their first impressions of a Web site—what clues and cues (what the poker players call "tells") we use to judge credibility—so they can survive that initial judgment. In other words so they can fake it, but let's be generous and say so they can avoid blunders that would cause a visitor to dismiss the site before they understood the message. Consumers Union , the people behind Consumer Reports magazine, was interested enough in how we judge Web site credibility that in 1999 they commissioned the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University to undertake a large-scale study of how people judge the credibility of a Website [1] . Three years later, Stanford published the data, and a set of recommendations for better presenting a Website. These Ten tips [2] for building Web site credibility were distilled from their large-scale study (the tips are theirs, the comments mine): -Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. Provide citations when you can and back up information you present with links to original documents and off-site sources. If you're worried about people not coming back to your site, open the links in a new window—but warn people first. Few people will actually follow those links, your payoff comes from simply providing them. -Show that there's a real organization behind your site. Photos of your office or your staff will help convince visitors that real folks stand behind the Web site, as will providing a physical address, phone numbers, trade-group and Chamber of Commerce memberships. If you're concerned about privacy, instead of pictures of your staff, show their bicycles or their shoes—any evidence to tie you to the bricks-and-mortar world. -Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. Provide credentials for the experts on your team and lists of accomplishments and experience for your organization.

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