TRUST: Your Most Vital Product

Whatever product or service you offer on your site - or even if your site is purely informational - its most important aspect may well be the trust it creates for your visitors.

Visitors to your Web site arrive with certain expectations, every one of them related to trust. In other words, your visitors bring the same expectations to your site that you bring to your own visits to businesses and financial institutions, both on-line and in the real world. These include assurances that:

• Your site is authentic and legitimate
• The information presented on your site is accurate and up-to-date
• Links embedded in your site are equally authentic, and virus and worm-free
• Customers' personal information will be protected, their financial information kept secure, and their identity safe; any use of customer information such as e-mail addresses should be spelled out in advance
• Any products or services purchased from the site are honestly represented, will be delivered or contracted as promised, with clear recourse and resolution paths should there be any problems
• They will come away from the site receiving only what they expected - any additional adware or customer-tracking tools must be clearly identified before being delivered to the customer's browser

If you don't deliver the highest level of trustworthiness on all of these fronts, it won't matter how good your products or services are your customers will lose confidence in your business.

How do you do this?

A good starting place is to review the security policies and practices of all the companies involved in your Web presence. Any problems or breaches of security and trust on their part will reflect on you, your site and your business.

Insist that your service providers - Web hosting company, Web site designer, software used on your site, and so on - provide a written list of their own security, privacy, and information-use policies. Where appropriate, find out how often the company updates its firewalls, anti-virus tools and other elements of a robust security profile.

Make sure your site designer places any security certificates prominently on your site.

If your site accepts credit card and other financial transactions, post the processor's name, logo and policies on your site. Insure that the highest standards of data encryption are employed. Review your transaction processor's policies on use of customer information and insist that it meet your standards.

If you employ an external business for fulfillment of goods sold online, review their policies and practices as carefully as those of all other businesses involved in your online presence. Pay particular attention to fulfillment company guarantees, return policies and subsequent uses of customer information.

Finally, don't forget the small details that can affect a customer's overall impression of your site and your business. Watch out for spelling errors, out-of-date information and other inaccuracies, as well as broken or incorrect links.

Every aspect of your Web site contributes to your customers' trust in you and your business and any problem with any element can begin chipping away at that trust.

The Bottom Line: Trust itself may be intangible, but constant review of the security and marketing practices of your Web service providers can help insure that your site is trustworthy and that your customers recognize this every time they visit.