(Note: Per their site, Captology is “The Study of Computers as Persuasive Technology”)

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I will go over my view on the 10 guidelines that they cover in the overview of their study.

1. “Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).” You have an average of 8 seconds to capture your customers’ attention. A large part of this is done graphically or by a major headline for your site. As times change, the design for websites has become increasingly important for web credibility.

2. “Make it easy to verify accuracy of information on your website.” If you make it easy for people to verify accuracy of information, you gain trust and credibility in the eyes of your customers, making it faster to get them sold on your product or services. One byproduct is that it gives people the feeling of transparency in your company.

3. “Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.” Some ideas that come to mind are listing a phone number, showing pictures of the staff or offices or as they mentioned in the study or listing a physical address. You can show pictures and credentials of the management staff.

4. “Highlight the expertise in your organization.” Many companies have very qualified personnel on board, hence them being in business. Don’t hold back from showing the credentials of the staff. As a note, don’t bore people with long list of credentials for each person right up front. List some and if a person wants to know more make it available to them.

5. “Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site” This can be done in many ways. You can show pictures, information and credentials of the people involved. One successful way of implementing this point is giving a little personal information on your staff.

6. “Make it easy to contact you” These are some ideas on how to implement this point.

a. Put your phone number in the upper right hand corner of your website, making it easy for people to find out how to call you if they need to.

b. If you have a contact form on your website, don’t include many fields for people to trudge through, simply include a Name, Email, Phone Number and Notes field. Requiring a lengthy form means people will leave.

c. Having a live online chat. I have seen this used especially well with companies that sell many products. This way your customers

7. “Make your site easy to use — and useful.”

At the end of the day, functionality is more important than design. But I hate when I see people use this as an excuse to have BAD design. There are ways to create a website that is completely functional and that has great design.

One way this can be applied is in the navigation. Navigation should be easy to use and no surprises. I am totally in agreement with having an innovative website, but don’t make the navigation too innovative. That is probably the most important part to have “normal” on a website.

8. “Update your site’s content often (at least show that its been review recently).”

This point is important for website credibility and search engine optimization. Google does keep track of when your website was last updated. So updated it often to keep everyone happy.

9. “Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).”

I would say the biggest violators on this point are people that have Google adsense or any other such program on their website. In terms of credibility, every time I see ads like that any credibility they had has now dropped in my eyes.

10. “Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.”

It’s worth it to get an editor for the content on your website if needed, just to make sure its perfect. Typos are the biggest example of times people violate this point. They are very much credibility crashers, just don’t allow them.

The same applies to links to pages that don’t exist and things like that.

I agree with these points and could see that they can be expanded as well. My examples of application are not the end-all ways to apply them. You should review them yourself and figure out all the ways that you and your company can apply these to your situation.

“Sell what your customers want, when they want it.”

The web has made this very easy, from large conglomerate sites like www.Amazon.com to niche sites such as www.PamperedPuppy.com. The availability and access of the web has empowered users to such a degree that it has affected how all customer relations are conducted on and off the web. The web made it easy for customers to access information when and where they want. They are no longer hooked into high pressure sales cycles when buying cars, they just look up all the information they want on any of the cars they want in the comfort of their own home.

SEO has become the game of finding out what internet users are searching and driving sites up in those search terms to gain exposure. This is basically following the datum above: Sell what your customers want, when they want it.

This can be applied multiple ways.

1. The main way is obviously with search engines. I have had clients that tell me “I know what keywords I want to be ranked on”. I then get a list of the words and find out that those search terms are not getting a lot of searches per month. The key then is finding out what keywords people are actually searching, then work to get your site ranked on those terms. Unless you have a high budget, I probably wouldn’t go for a term that has a 15,000 searches a month. If you have a large budget and have some time to really work on it, go for it.

2. There are forums on pretty much every topic or product that can be imagined. Some of the people going to these forums are interested in that topic or product as you can imagine. Posting helpful information on these sites can definitely result in traffic to your site as long as you make sure there is a link back to your site. (This also helps gain links back to your site).

3. Market-specific directories. So far I haven’t seen a great boost in submitting your site to thousands of directories which some companies provide as a service. I think you are much better off submitting your site to market-specific directories. If you are a dentist, submit your site to dentist directories. That way you are getting targeted placement. This has been far more effective in my experience than just submitting your site to random directories.

So those are a few of the ways to apply this datum, there are many others out there as well that I will list for you in the future.

They will be searching whether your site is there or not, so its worth it to work out where you want to get your site listed and a plan to go about getting placement in the search engines. It all starts with coming up with a product or service that people have real interest in and doing honest promotion to gain exposure on the web. Studio98 does custom search engine strategies for companies to help get them ranked in keywords to drive traffic to their website.

Rafferty Pendery