Trust and forming relationships is the key to keeping people interested in your services or information on the web. But how do we do this without a typical one-on-one interaction with the customer? Actually it needs to be a one-on-one relationship that we form with our web designs, even though it is not face-to-face.

Web site visitors negotiate their relationship with the vendor in much the same way they negotiate relationships with any stranger: by seeking information. Offering solutions, information, sharing tips and best practices before a sale or without a sale is a path to creating trust and in turn formulating the relationship you need to foster a sale.

Customers will need to feel secure with the relationship or they will turn around and seek another web designer, We should be prepared at a very basic level to assure our potential clients about
* Quality of the product
* Quality and reliability of your customer service
* Adherence to time lines
* Is this site secure (privacy, credit card information)?
* Is this really the best price?

Consumers want complete specs, and they want to know the online vendor will be there for them if something goes wrong.

Uncertainty about the stranger causes anxiety and distrust, and so seeking out information is a natural way of decreasing uncertainty and anxiety, and of building trust. So sharing information and being as human as possible when communicating with our web design is an essential element to forming the relationships we need, whatever it is we are trying to communicate or sell online.

For years and years web designers have heard this from web developers “…if you thought getting a web site to display well in all web browsers was difficult, wait until you try email newsletters.” This is true to a point, and as things in the web design world are always changing this is no exception.

There are many reasons to send HTML emails, but it should be done in the simpilest form possible and with the ability to choose plain text. Our customers don’t need to see the whole website in their email. They pay for bandwidth so some people will automatically prefer not to download all the HTML and images.

Developing HTML emails is a real challenge, and we should pay real attention to simplify code as well as our web design. Here is a link from sitepoint which illustrates these points rather well: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/

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