Credibility Checklist For Business Web Sites

1) Eliminate All Typos And Poor Grammar: Spelling mistakes, incorrect use of punctuation, incorrect use of words, and other grammatical errors are more than embarrassing. Don't minimize the importance of this. Visitors who are literate can find this almost unbearable, regardless of the industry you are in. This sort of thing is particularly inexcusable because fixing this type of mistake should take a webmaster just minutes.

2) Correct And Up-To-Date Content: Your site must be accurate and current. Any changes, updates, or redesigns can easily be created offline and posted in one shot. You should never have to say "Sorry, we no longer offer that product/service", or "We just haven't put up the new prices yet", or "We're in the process of updating our site".

3) Prove You Are Real: Have photographs of key employees, photos of your office or facility, photos of products, photos of you with clients. Give real contact info, phone numbers, and street address. (Never reveal too much personal information about your people or your other clients.)

4) Prove You Are Legitimate: Make prominent use of client testimonials, employee credentials, courses, awards, community endeavours. Mention past accomplishments of employees and/or management. Tell how you created specific tangible results for a previous client.

5) Educate Visitors/Potential Clients: Giving free advice, free articles, free videos, useful internet links, and/or a routinely updated blog are all good for establishing credibility. If you can help your visitors learn or discover something new, it will stick in their mind and set you apart as an authority on the subject.

See our Articles page at Second Glance Digital Media for more good stuff.

Our Three Latest Web Design Clients

Like most web design companies, we get some clients who have thoughtful ideas for their sites, and others who give us raw material and tell us to call them when it's done. It's the variety that makes it interesting.

Sometimes we get clients who are just fun to work with. Our latest three web design clients were actively engaged in the design of their sites, and all three were fun in their own way. (And of course each one of these is now a top-10 ranking site in their market, since that is our specialty at Second Glance Digital Media.)

Robin Walton, freehand illustrator and artist (RobinWalton.ca) - Being a freehand artist, Robin had given much thought to the look of her site and had made some custom drawings for it. All we needed to do was translate her ideas into a functioning site. This was fun to build for a few reason: she's an independent freelance artist, and we love putting people on a small budget in the top-10 search results; she came prepared with great ideas and custom content for the site; and she asked good questions about what could be done, what might look best, and responded immediately to mock-up approvals.

Inside Security, about the new Ontario security guard course and test (InsideSecurity.ca) - Inside Security also came prepared with tons of content. There's nothing better than good content. It makes site design easy and search engines love heaps of real information. We spent some time acquiring images to supplement the predominant text, but much of it was simply building the site and getting layout approvals from the client. It's a straightforward design, very clean and easy to read. There's nothing cute or artsy to distract from the solid text content of this informative site.

Heritage Natural Beef, drug-free local beef (HeritageNaturalBeef.com) - Another case where it was rewarding to put a small business in the top-10 search results. They actually had a site for several years but it couldn't be found in searches, and I mean you couldn't find it no matter how hard you intentionally tried. It hadn't been banned or anything, it was basically just lacking every possible element of correct design. When we were done they ranked number two, only behind the long established industry leader.

Google Wave Revisited

Chatting with a friend the other day about the demise of Google Wave inspired me to find my original post about it. Turns out it was one year and one day between my post (Aug 03, 2009) and Google's acknowledgement (Aug 04, 2010) that it was a failure.

Here's my original post about Google Wave, no need for further comment.

And here's Google's official blog post ending support.

Stats: Operating System Usage

This post we look at the operating systems used by visitors to our sites.

XP still has a massive lead over both Vista and Windows 7. Businesses and consumers despised and rejected Vista from day one, and Microsoft acknowledged that failure. But it did ship on new computers for quite some time, so takes the distant second place.


One would have to assume that people are only moving into Win7 with the purchase of a new computer, rather than buying it to install on a current computer. And computer purchases must be slim, since Win7 has been shipping on new computers since around Christmas 2009. I was shocked at such a low percentage of Win7 users, as it has gotten fairly good reviews from techies. Although when you look at it another way, there are more Win7 users than Mac users, and Mac OSx has been around for a heck of a lot longer than 9 months. So Win7 certainly has market share.

The other/unknown browser category include some iPhones, Win2003, WinNT, network servers, and search engine crawlers. None of them accounted for more than a few percent each.

Stats: Javascript Enabled or Disabled

Another stat about the visitors to our highest traffic domains.


Javascript is generally enabled by default, but can be disabled within your browser settings. It is often used to determine which ads to show on a web page, set formatting and layout styles, and gather information about user activity.

So why would it be enabled or disabled?

Disabling it can considerably speed up web page load times, prevent piles of third-party advertisers from tracking things, and eliminate spyware & trojan risks.

Java is a two-way street, it sends data back to the server about the settings and usage of the browser and computer being used. Simply by looking at a web page without clicking on anything, Javascript is running.

"Java exploits" are currently being used quite often to piggyback trojans into computers. (Cell phones and PDAs are at risk too, because they are powered by Java and it can't be turned off. Blackberry/iPhone/cell hacking has become a new goldmine of identity theft because everyone stores all their phone numbers, contacts, emails, account logins, photos, and other personal info on them.)

We've also made the interesting observation that sites offering higher-ticket specialty products and services have noticably higher rates of Javascript disabled (upwards of 30%). Should we assume these people are more security-aware in general, and/or more tech-savvy?

Are the above stats surprising? Higher or lower disabling than you'd expect?

Stats: Browsers Used By Visitors To Our Sites

Here's a current look at the browsers being used by visitors to the heaviest traffic sites that we operate. No big surprises with Internet Explorer leading the pack, followed by Firefox.


Without saying too much about our clients, trust me when I say this traffic is very broad in scope. These statistics reflect traffic to sites in many unrelated industries, with very different target audiences and user demographics (from highly educated specialists to random consumers, and from world-wide to Peterborough-specific).

Excerpt: Why Local Businesses Need Web Sites

Here's an excerpt from one of the articles on our site:
Why Local Businesses Need Web Sites.

"Local businesses serve clients who live or work physically near the business. Local businesses can be small or large, but the key factors that make them "local" are: they offer products or services that people need to experience first-hand (like eating in a restaurant), or prefer to try first (like trying on shoes or clothing before purchase), or are impossible to do at any distance (like getting your car fixed)..."

When you think about it, our lives revolve around local businesses: dentists, realtors, accountants, lawyers, optometrists, auto dealers, repair shops, hair salons, etc. The funny thing is many of these businesses and professionals don't understand the benefits of advertising their services, including having a proper web site. Some of them will happily run ads in the local newspaper, yet never spend a few hundred dollars to have even a simple site built. Hard to believe.

This is a fairly long article, designed to help business owners and managers understand the value of a web site. Pass it along or leave a comment if you find it helpful.

Over-Reliance On Portable Devices

Over the past few weeks I've been hearing stories of stolen laptops and iPhones. And extremely worried victims were asking what to do. Some people entrust virtually all their personal data to their portable devices, and a theft can be very traumatic. The list of emergency measures is often huge, and can require taking a day or two off work to get done.

One person had his iPhone stolen out from under him. He'd grabbed an armful of things from his car, taken them to the house, then returned for the last couple of things. In that minute or two, someone stole his iPhone from the car. What was on it? Pretty much every important detail of his life, both personal and work.

You better pray that you can access your data from somewhere within minutes of a theft. Log in to your email accounts, save everything, and close the accounts before thieves delete it or send spam... turn off Facebook and Twitter updates... tell banks and credit card companies (and possibly cancel cards & close accounts)... tell all your friends, family, work associates, clients... tell your ISP... tell your workplace network admin... cancel your iTunes account... and so on. This post isn't about the endless number of things you may need to do in case of theft. Just stop and ask yourself - What kind of nightmare would it be if your device was lost or stolen?

The problems start with how people use portable devices:

1) Usernames & passwords stored on the device. Do you have usernames and passwords stored so you can access email, bank accounts, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, or other sites quickly? Within minutes, thieves can delete your accounts (or keep them and change the passwords), message your friends, and rack up charges like you wouldn't believe. You are much safer using passwords you can remember, typing them in each time.

2) Phone numbers, including friends, family, work. If you use one-touch dialing, or use a contact list/application, thieves just got a list of everyone important in your life. For indentity theft, prank calls, or to keep for later.

3) Email stored on the device. For the record, I've never in my life used a "storage" type of email service on any computer, like Outlook or Mac Mail. Web-based email, like Hotmail or Gmail, doesn't need to store anything on any device. If someone stole any of my computers, they wouldn't have a single email or piece of data about any of my contacts. In fact they wouldn't even know what email services I use. Plus if one of my computers caught fire 2 minutes from now, I could access my email using another one and nothing would be any different. I suggest either a password-protected email program on your device, or using a web-based email service that stores nothing on your device.

These are just some of the bigger security problems with portable devices, all caused by how people use them. The list of issues and solutions is really endless, but your headaches will be in direct proportion to how much data you store on your device in the first place. Portable devices can be handy tools, but they can also be lost or stolen in the blink of an eye. And keep in mind that some of the best security tips are equally useful in cases of a device freezing or crashing.