Given the nature of my business, I spend a lot of time online and see many other sites. I am constantly checking to see how others do things and collecting the best information I can find for my customers. I suppose each of us has our own opinion about what constitutes a "good site," or what makes us distrust any site. There are several things, though, that tip the scales for me and make me immediately suspicious, or not trust the people that are presumably behind the electronic facade they are asking me to use.

The thing that makes me most distrust any online business is feeling "tricked" by them. Some sites are designed to force the user to drill down into the site to find what he wants. When you get to what you’re looking for, though, you discover that you have to register, or provide information about yourself and / or your business, or worse yet pay for something you expected to get for free. When this happens to me, I leave immediately. I don't mind that someone wants a little information, or charges for a product or service that they provide; they just need to tell me that upfront, if they want me to trust their business.

Second, I do not like to be presented with any obstacles in communicating with an online business. It amazes me how many of them create these roadblocks - not making the contact process obvious on the site, not providing an e-mail address and forcing you to go through the site, not being able to communicate with a person, not having an easy way to follow up with them, if they don't respond, not having telephone contact available, etc. You know it's intentional. You know this process is designed to make things easier and more efficient for the company, than for you, the customer.

Third, it frustrates me to no end to be disappointed by the quality of the supporting material on a site. While there is a huge amount of information to be found online, frankly, most of it is useless and it's there because the business owner read someplace that he should have a lot of "content" on his site to draw people in and to enhance his search engine placement. For me, it totally undermines the credibility of a site, when it provides "articles" that have no substance, or worse yet, when the articles are just blatant commercials for the company's products. That's why at Business Advisor Online we read every article before we post it, include less than 20% of what we read, and provide both a summary and a rating of every article, so the reader doesn't waste his time.