Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility | Hacker News Reader

Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility

credibility.stanford.edu

59 pointsccarpenterg16 comments

How about don't use Silverlight for your video?[1] That might do something for your credibility. Nobody, absolutely nobody, would seriously choose Silverlight over the alternatives without being offered inducements from Microsoft.

Edit: Also the link at the top of the page when you click on the "Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab" goes to http://www.captology.org/ which fails instead of http://captology.stanford.edu/ I think they are violating some of their rules with that one.

[1] http://see.stanford.edu/see/lecturelist.aspx?coll=63480b48-8...

To be fair about the broken link, it does say at the bottom: "Updated June, 2002"

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

To be fair the site doesn't comply with guideline number 9:

Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).

But it's ok anyway.

What's wrong with Silverlight?

(just curious)

The bugginess/underdevelopment of its linux plugin is one huge issue.

It would have to be pretty damn buggy and underdeveloped to lose to Flash in that department. Until just now I wasn't aware there even was a Linux plugin.

Just try it out and you'll understand how polished it makes linux flash look. (It is provided by mono)

Actually, Silverlight can play video just fine on less powerful machines where flash completely falls apart. There is a reason Netflix uses it.

The article is from 2002. I wonder what the percentage of modern startups don't try to meet these guidelines (particularly the ones involving showing physical addresses and details of real humans behind the site)

It'd be interesting to see whether any more recent a/b testing gave any indications on whether they still make any difference...

I’m always confused as to why so many websites from the US don’t provide some sort of physical address, a name, a telephone number, even only a email address. Maybe I’m spoilt because it’s actually against the law in Germany to not provide name, address, telephone number and email address on your website (you can either put it on every page or put a link to the page with this information on every page) but to me it just seems impolite, unprofessional, even scammy if you don’t.

Well depends

If it is just a blog, then they might prefer the privacy.

I’ve seen my fair share of websites from businesses without so much as a hint as to who is behind it. It’s not as though I expect every blog to provide the address of the author.

I agree. I generally won't give money to a company that I can't contact. It's just asking for trouble.

Perhaps the site is trying to set a negative example, so it might be learned from?

Also peculiar, if it hasn't been updated in eight years, why is it using silverlight? [And regarding http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606292 -- that lack of awareness could be considered a bug of silverlight's linux plugin itself.]

I had decided the weird indentation of bullets 5 & 7 was too small to mention - until I got to recommendation #10.

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