HOW CAN A WEBSITE BE TRUSTED?

TRUSTWORTHINESS WITHIN WEBSITES

What does trust mean to an organisation? How can a website become more trustworthy? How can trust from consumers be measured? And how can it be encouraged?

Trust is one concept that seems obvious, but it is difficult to explain because the word “TRUST” has a wide range of interpretations for every consumer. Trust can be measured by willingness of visitors to interact with a website in some way. Rusman, Van Bruggen and Koper 2007 argue that trust is based on mental model of cognitive and emotional elements which leads to a subjective degree of belief about agent or an organisation. These belief and expectations from consumers in turn leads to a degree of willingness from the consumers (Gefen, Benbasat and Pavlou 2008).

Gill, Boies, Finegan and McNally 2006 define trust in an organisational context as the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.

Trust plays an important role in any transaction and trust is a subjective judgement that has to be made by every consumer when visiting a website. Some of the characteristics a consumer may look at in evaluating trustworthiness on a website could be the following:

· Is the website presented in a professional?

· Is the website easy to navigate?

· Do other consumers trust the website?

· Does the information on the site make sense?

· Does the website keep up with up-to-date technology such as the use of flash or Java?

Trustworthiness is not the same as trust, though both concepts are related. Trustworthiness can be explained as the belief that someone is worthy to trust. Becerra, Heard, Kremer and Denzinger 2007 explain that before evaluating a user’s trustworthiness, his/her attributes have to meet some requirements.

One way to improve trust on a website is by drawing up a checklist, because trust is irrational, an organisation can have everything right on their website, but if a consumer does not like the colour scheme of the website, he/she may trust that website less. For example, some researchers have argued that if a website has a white colour scheme the website can be trusted, but if it has a black or red colour scheme, this can’t be trusted. Bradley S 2006 explains that in allowing consumers see the inside of a business can help in increasing the trust that consumer have on the business and the website. For example, having important and necessary information’s such as “About Us” or “Timeline” to show the organisation’s history can go a long way in establishing trust with consumers who visit the website.

Now the question is how can an organisation persuade consumer’s to trust their website? Below is a simple checklist of what can be included in a website to increase the level of trust in the mind of consumers:

· Details of the organisation that owns the website, this could include the address of the organisation, phone numbers and even registration data if it is a business.

· Lack of obvious errors in spelling.

· Having out of date information on the website.

· For financial transactions, it is very important to use a secure server.

· A respectable top level domain.

· Also, having a FAQ page which will address all related issues to do with the website can make few important cases for a consumer.

Are fans able to Trust the Chelsea football club website?

Before entering into the Chelsea football club website, there is an intro page which offers fans to either enter into the main website or purchase ticket for the next game and an opportunity to open an account. Below are the strengths and weakness of Chelsea’s Football club website and some recommendation on it can be improved for fans to trust the website.

STRENGTHS

SPEED: The speed it takes to load the website is pretty fast, all flash and videos are loaded within seconds.

COLOUR SCHEME: The colour scheme for the website does represent the colour scheme for the football club itself which is Blue and White.

PRESENTATION: The website is presented in a very neat format, all the necessary information for fans need can be generated off the website. It is user friendly, as the website has videos uploaded on it which is also fast.

WEAKNESS

STRUCTURE: The structure of the website seems to have too much going on. For example, to many boxes which include information such as News, Shopping etc. All these have its own menu bar which makes it unnecessary to have a box on the home page. This makes the website cluster with too much information and fans can be de-motivated to find the information they seek.

Reference

Bradley S (2006) 'Building Trust through Transparency'[online] available from <http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/online-business/building-trust-through-transparency/>

Gill, H., Boies, K., Finegan, J., McNally, J. (2005), "Antecedents of trust: establishing a boundary condition for the relation to propensity to trust and intention to trust", Journal of Business & Psychology, Vol. 19 No.3, pp.287-302.

Rusman, E; J. Van Bruggen and R.Koper (2007). Theoretical framework for the design and development of a personal identity profile fostering interpersonal trust in virtual project team. 6^th International workshop on social intelligence.

Gefen, D; I Benbasat and P.A Pavlou (2008). A research agenda for trust in online environments. Journal of Management information systems, 24, (4), 275-286

Becerra, G; K. Heard, R. Kremer and J. Denzinger (2007). Trust attributes, methods and uses. The workshop on trust in agent societies at the sixth international joint conference in Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. (AAMAS-2007) May15, 1-6