Trust Marks That’ll Boost Your Site’s Credibility

Building trust marks for your website is the sure way to boost its credibility. Yes! Establishing credibility of your website is as important as your product or services. Customers need to feel confident and trust your online interface enough to consider buying from you. Most companies offering development services would recommend this so you can reap optimum results from your website.

So, what are these trust marks? Many would say that security is the utmost sign of trust. Agreed! Any website offering products or services must be equipped with security so customers do not hesitate to transact. However, security is not the only thing. Let’s look at the website from wholistic point of view. A survey carried out by a consultancy concluded that factors such as security trust marks, professional looking website, fast loading pages, easy navigation, well displayed contact details, referrals from family or friends, etc. are all crucial to establishing credibility of a website. There are various trust marks that can help boost your website credibility. Here’s few to consider –

1) Security Seals
Security seals are the foremost thing you can think of when you talk of trust marks. Customers who share their information, whether credit card or personal, are but obviously wary of doing so unless they feel they can trust the website. Putting up security seals like Verisign, McAfee SECURE or PayPal badges would establish credibility for your website. No matter how you plan to make your website secure, your customers would want to know the facts. And security seals can build their confidence. You can take help of your web developer to plan and put it there.

2) SSL Certificate
SSL certificate is another important trust seal any business website would need. It has a corresponding web address which can be seen as https, signifying a secured website. You may check out Jenni McKinnon’s post on SSL certificate authorities to understand this better.

3) Third Party Logos
Whether or not to use third party logos on your website has always been debatable. Do not think of them as distracters but rather attracters. Yes! Third party logo provides a proof that you are associated with that brand. It offers transparency and builds confidence. Use logos of your clients so your prospective customers see which credible brands you have worked with. This will make it easy for them to trust your services.

4) Awards & Certifications
Displaying your awards and certifications on your website is a sure shot way to ensure your customers trust in your services. If your services or products or your website has earned a certification or an award for its professionalism or accomplishment, go ahead and put it on the website for your customers to see it.

5) Customer Reviews
Online users want to validate every aspect of your service and that’s exactly the reason why you should provide them all the important trust marks. Exhibiting social proof of your service on your website would make it easy for them to decide. Yes! We are talking about customer reviews. Positive reviews from your customers act as trust boosters. About 74% of the customers are more likely to trust your brand based on that. So, include customer reviews and rating widgets from Yelp like sites and make it a straight forward way for your customers.

6) Customer Testimonials
A better word about your services or products from your customers and you has topped your cake with the delicious icing. Yes! It works as a delight. Customer wants to know how your other customers have been serviced. Quoting their testimonials on your website would be a powerful trust mark for your website. Even case studies act as powerful tool, although putting together the details of the same can be time consuming.

7) Social Media Widget
Social media integration with your website is known to be one of the best practices today. Besides providing users engagement, it offers to serve as a trust mark, allowing your users to connect with your brand on various social media platform. Include all the social media links and widgets to show that your brand is actively involved on the online media.

8) About Page
About Page information is crucial and important too. Customers want to know all about the company – how it was founded, founders, directors, presence, etc. This helps them to determine the credibility of the company and hence act as one of the greatest trust mark for your WordPress website.

9) Multi-Channel Contact
Websites must be customer friendly and allow you customers to reach you in the easiest possible way. Establish multiple channels of contact on your website whether its email, contact number, contact and enquiry form or live chat. Enable your customers to reach you faster. They serve the purpose of building the trust.

10) Terms of Use Statements
The final one, terms of use statements stands as a crucial trust mark for couple of reasons. It offers complete transparency to the visitors of your website. They get to understand how their personal information will be managed or used by your company. The terms of use statements must include –

• If you are collecting email addresses or using remarketing pixels, privacy policy is important and must be published
• Guarantee of service statements
• Rules and regulations pertaining to payment, penalties or refund

You can also publish your internal policies on your website under these terms of use statements. This allows you to protect your intellectual properties and hold your customers’ responsible if need be.

To conclude – enhance your website credibility with these great trust marks and you will see the difference already. If possible, take help of a professional WordPress development service provider for suggestions.

Website Maintenance – Necessity or a Luxury?!!!

Website maintenance is something that most companies have been putting on their strategy list as a last priority. For many companies, it’s not even on the list. Consider this! You buy a Lamborghini and expect it to serve you luxury ride lifetime without having to spend a penny on it. Not possible, right? How do you expect your website to give your business a boost by just putting it up on the web?
Website is one of the vital business marketing tools and its maintenance is crucial to retain your customer interest and allure the new ones. Here’s why you must seriously consider engaging a website maintenance company for the upkeep of your website –

Search Engine Friendly
If you want your website to be liked by search engines, website maintenance is must. If your website has not been updated for a while, Google may cease looking at it and it may lose ranking for important keywords.

Saving From Hacker Attacks
Whether you are using a CMS based website (most preferred, of course!), or using a software programming on your website, you must know that updating security patches for these is must. This is something you mustn’t ignore, else, your website may fall prey to the hands of hackers who thrive on websites which are not so secured.

Customer Interest
No matter how big or small your business is, customer retention is an important aspect. You don’t want customer to land on your webpage and find a news or a blog which is dated 6 months back, do you? That’s exactly the reason you need to look at updating your website information on a regular basis. This will also help in creating a new customer base.

Fixing Broken Links
You may not realize this but for reason unknown (sometimes), you may have internal or external broken links. It’s important to scan your website to scan for these and fix them. So, your visitors do not end up seeing error pages.

Content Quality
Checking and rechecking content quality is a part of website maintenance. Companies that offer website maintenance services advise you to create content which is free of plagiarism. Which means, no duplicate content. Use right keywords effectively. Another aspect to look into is spelling mistakes. Yes! This is most of the times, ignored. How would you feel to visit your potential vendor’s website and read the content which has grammatical errors or spelling mistakes?! Not a good impression, right? That’s what you should be worried about too.
Website maintenance is not a luxury investment but a necessity. It would be a wise business decision to include it in your marketing budget. Website maintenance costs charged by service providers are usually annual and pretty reasonable. It’s a nominal investment that will reap you good returns.

Pros & Cons of Using Magento as Your E-commerce Platform

Whether you are planning to roll out a new online store or already have one as your core business, Magento is one of the best ecommerce platform to have work for you. It is for sure the first preference of the companies offering ecommerce website development services. With a total market share of 29.1% (as per a research), Magento is clearly dominating other ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Prestashop and many others. Why most Magento website development companies opt for this wonderful platform? There are more reasons than you can think of. Let’s look at the pros –

Open Source Platform
For those who are just starting and those who wish to explore, Magento is the best ecommerce platform available that uses open source and programming. The good news is that the community edition of Magento is available for free. Loaded with all the necessary features, for starters, it’s nothing less than a sweet delight. And to top it up, it is backed by community support of veteran Magento developers who have made their instrumental contributions through development of new extensions and offering their support to the users.

Feature Rich Platform
Magento website development turns out to be more lucrative option because of its rich features too. Unlike other platforms, Magento ecommerce platform is packed with great functionality and features. Some of these features include multi language, multi store functionality and multi-currency support. The platform is also search engine friendly and has designs that are mobile compatible.

User Friendly Admin Panel
This is of course the best treat your website admin can get. Who would want to manage a backend which is too complex?! This is also one of the reasons why an ecommerce development company would pick Magento over other platforms – user friendly admin panel loaded with easy to use features offers great experience to the admin and make it all easy.

Scalable & Customizable Platform
Being an open source platform, Magento is a fully scalable platform which can be used for ecommerce website development. This is great when you are expanding, you would certainly need dedicated servers for better efficiency of your website. Magento also allows you to customize your store as you wish. With theme structural designs, you can have you store the way to want it to be. With complete control over the codes, you will be able to modify any feature you like. While there are more reasons why ecommerce website development provider would choose to go with Magento, it’s better to look at the other side too. No harm in knowing the cons part. Let’s peep into it –

Costly Talent Hire
Magento community edition may be free. However, Magento developers come at a very good price. Reason being, comprehending the complexities of Magento is a challenging task for novices and hence if you must, you need to look at only skilled developers for your ecommerce website development. And this would cost you quite a handsome amount.

Higher Investment on Enterprise Version
Unless the online store is your core business, going for an enterprise version may not make sense for your business. That’s because it’s quiet and investment which starts at $14420 annually.

Hosting Charges
Most Magento ecommerce development companies would advise you to go for dedicated servers for your online stores as Magento is a very large system. Having a shared server may lead to reduced speed and efficiency of your website.

High Time Investment in Customization
Magento website development is time consuming. Magento is fantastic when it comes to customization. However, as compared to other platforms, it takes longer time to build the functionality.

All in all, Magento ecommerce platform remains a great choice for business that intends to sell online. With great functionality and features and high scalability, it is a lucrative option in the long run.