For product illustration, stick with clear image taken point blank. For artistic purpose, aim for professionally developed ones that represent both aesthetics and character of your brand.

Content

Writing style

There is nothing new here. Your copy, especially of product info, should be tight, to point, and grammatically correct, for you to deliver your message effectively. A bit of puffery and flowery lines might do well as a welcome mat, but that's about it. For a content site, break your paragraphs in two to 3 lines of text - rather than according to sub-themes -- as reading on a monitor causes eyestrain. And no typos; even an occasional spelling mistake is intolerable and can taint your professionalism.

Fonts

The size, type, and color of your fonts must be readable and fit overall design elements. Fonts that are too big overwhelm users, while too small ones are hard to read especially by people over 40.

Fonts in too many color variations look crude and rudimentary; stay with your site's base color(s) for headlines and black for text. Verdana, Times, and Arial are types most commonly used today, in size 2 for text and 4 for headlines.

Company information

Providing detailed information about your company - people, location, and contact - is compulsory to reinforce your credibility and assure users there are real business and real people behind your site. In your 'About Us' page, post concise information about your management board and financial backers, who in charge of what, etc.

Give users physical location of your business -- real address, not P.O. Box -- along with your telephone and fax number, email address, and representative who takes inquiries (this person rather not be webmaster, but staffers of marketing department).

Usability

Page length

Friends don't let friends hit 'Page Down' more than 3 times, and Web designers should remember this. For content sites lengthy pages mean long reading, which is particularly tiresome online. While actual length doesn't change, breaking your content down to several pages unloads that burden. Better yet, provide a printer-friendly version for offline reading.

Horizontal scrolling

As noted by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, horizontal scrolling is one of top ten Web usability failures in 2002. It drags down reading and makes scanning cumbersome, while implying rudimentary design and scant commitment to users' online experience.

Pop-up ads

Denounced as bastard son of Internet marketing of 2002, pop-ups are going deeper down toilet as major sites like iVillage, AOL, AskJeeves, and likely more to come, subsequently scraped pop-ups altogether last year. A real put off to online experience, pop-ups taint your brand credibility (remember X10?). A recent survey by GartnerG2 found that pop-up ads are "most irritating," with 78.3 percent of respondents calling ads "very annoying." Unless yours are a recognized and reputable brand name like The New York Times, stay away from pop-ups.

Of course, achieving a brand credibility that sustains overtime requires more than a good first impression. However, capturing a prospect's interest with an image you are trying to portray is a crucial step in communicating your brand and personality it represents. And isn't that what we are aiming at?

A clear example is Singapore Airlines, which ranks among top 20 safest airlines in world. In wake of October-2000 crash at Taipei airport, company immediately confirmed accident and possible causes, releasing a list of deceased passengers to press and victims' family members. A dreadful episode for one of world's safest carrier, accident apparently did not hurt its long-term image, according to John Trevett, a trainer of air-crash investigators at Cranfield University in England, as quoted by Time.

BusinessWeek regularly admits and posts printing errors and false information noticeably in readers' page of its weekly issues, though it could have gotten easily by overlooking errors or not publishing letters of critics and corrections from its readers. At end of day, magazine only reinforces its brand as a trustworthy and credible business-information source.

We can also learn from software giant Microsoft, which since past two years has dominated media headlines with its announcement of flaws in its products along with potential resulting damages. While such tactics obviously won't diminish its perceived strong-arm tactics, at very least Microsoft spawns sense of responsibility and concerns for consumers using its products.

In end, disclosing mistakes and claiming responsibilities accordingly may actually reinforce or improve your brand. One thing we marketers should keep in mind is that negative publicity serves as a complement to positive PR ploys. A controllable dose won't harm your image, but doing it on a daily basis is a prescription for disaster.