Bearfruit

Have you ever mis-typed a domain name and been taken to one of these parked sites filled with links? It only takes you a fraction of a second to tell you’re in the wrong place. I’m not talking about porn, gambling or pop-up laden websites, just these squatter-style parked domain web pages with tons of links. Sometimes I’ve come across sites that are legitimate sites but my first thought is, uh-oh, I mis-typed, I hit a parked domain site. This is because something intangible about the site’s homepage is communicating that the site doesn’t really contain any information.

I’m going through a bit of a mental exercise to try and understand what about a site gives it instant credibility. What makes a site say to a person in the first fraction of a second, “you’ve found a real site, there’s good stuff here.”

I think there are a number of factors but the one I’m thinking about right now is the link to text ratio. That is the number of links a person sees in proportion to content. For example, see this screenshot of the free bsd homepage:

To my eye it feels like they’ve crossed the line where there are too many links. If it weren’t for the recognizable demon I’d probably have hit my back button without a second thought. (This shows that there is more than just this theoretical “link to text” ratio involved in the credibility of a site, but more on that later)

But then look at a site like Yahoo:

It has far more links than the freebsd site does. But there are differences:

• When you go to Yahoo! you expect to see a bunch of links
• Yahoo! does not use underlines
• Many of the links on Yahoo are buttons or graphics

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. What other elements give a site credibility? Is there something about the graphic design, the colours, the domain name or the layout that you can do to help?