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.