The era of Internet communications opens up huge possibilities for small businesses that just didn’t exist in the pre-Internet days. Now, with clever use of the Internet, a tiny company can compete with the big boys without needing the money to hire a national sales team, buy high street stores or pay for billboard ads.

That’s all great, but, and it’s a big one, your potential customers know this too. They know that anyone with a little bit of time and money can make a website advertising their services. Those potential customers also know that a website does not a reliable business make, that there needs to be someone behind the website that they can do business with. This all comes down to credibility, and how specific signals given off by a website can either bolster or undermine your credibility as a business.

I would highly recommend reading the one-page Guidelines for Web Credibility compiled by Stanford University. The guidelines are ten easy to understand steps you can take to build the credibility of your website, with the direct benefit that can have for your bottom line.

7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.
Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

I liked all 10 of the guidelines, but that one particularly resonates with me. I’ll be coming back to this list in the future, as there is a lot of excellent material here for making a real difference to how small business succeeds on the web. In the meantime I’d recommend a good article by Top Dog Strategy exploring this subject in more depth.