Web Usability & Credibility

Web usability and credibility have gotten more and more attention over the last years. It's not only important anymore "to provide a website" to clients and customers it is also highly important to provide it in a way of being trustworthy, informative, and easy to use.

No matter if you are selling products or services, every visitor to your site is a potential customer. Therefore, your website has to be presented perfectly in the very moment one hits your site for the first time. You got only one shot to persuade the visitor to stay or to leave right away forever.

In order to make a "perfect" website (user-friendly, web creditable), there are some guidelines you can follow. First, long loading time, or annoying splash pages should be avoided - unless there is a real need in providing a flash intro or splash page. If you use sound make sure, it can be turned off or is played only a limited time. Keep in mind, loading will increase. Provide images in a nice quality but reasonable "size" - don't make the viewer wait forever to see the image.
User-friendly means also that a visitor can find his or her way easily around on your site; thus keep the navigation consistent in looks, positioning and order. To convey your message, provide rather less information, but deliberate. If you have big chunks of text, break it down with with interesting imagery ("nicely" compressed).

For more information on this topic, visit following subject related links:
Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
Webcredible