A recent link on Hacker News pointed to research at Stanford establishing guidlines for Web Credibility.

I would recommend it to anybody who deals with communication, marketing or design of corporate websites.

Particularly interesting (to me) are those guidelines that deal solely with design, rather than content:

6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more…

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…

10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

Obviously there are a number of other recommendation that aren’t design-based, but I pulled these out as a reminder that web design is intimately connected to communications and credibility-building. It’s something that all designers should be mindful of.

P.S. For those with a deep interest in web credibility, there are some great resources at the Stanford Web Credibility Research site.

Just a brief comment on an Economist article abouth the death of yearbooks that found its way onto Hacker News.

It astonishes me how mainstream media inevitably take such a polar view of the analog-to-digital cultural transition. The thesis of the article is predictable - traditional yearbooks are expensive, but ‘permanent’ and nostalgic; whereas digital substitutes are cheap and accessible, but transient.

The nuanced position is ignored. Why couldn’t you utilize both digital and traditional mediums?

Here’s an idea…

Publish the yearbook as a pdf and email it to student, as well as storing it on your institution’s website for easy access by alumni who forget to back up. Then, provide the pdf to a friendly POD publisher so that alumni who want a hard copy can purchase one themselves - not just on graduation, but whenever they so desire. You could allay privacy concerns by using a password system.

Why not take it one step further - make the ‘yearbook’ a dynamic digital product, leveraging existing assets such as facebook, flickr, students’ blogs etc - like a friendfeed for a year-group of non-nerds. Alumni could access it whenever they’re feeling reminiscent, and would interact both with memories and current friend events. Periodically (say for reunions) you could have this render into a pdf that could again be distributed through a POD publisher.

Maybe this is too hard for a few students at an educational institution to do. If that’s the case, it could make for an interesting startup project for a young hacker.