A funny thing happened when we were considering potential web design and digital marketing topics to cover on this blog. Sifting through trade publications and our news feed, we noticed an article about how site owners can “build trust” with consumers via their web design. The recommendations and examples in that article were not without merit, but it was difficult to focus upon them after clicking onto the page and immediately being confronted with intrusive banner ads that awkwardly broke up the content, as well as unmistakably generic and borderline irrelevant visual elements.

If a reader were being generous, they might actually wonder whether the writer was deliberately undercutting his own trustworthiness by publishing there, in order to provide an object lesson in what not to do. Of course, it’s far more likely that the writer had little to no say in the web design that surrounded his article, or in the images that were chosen to accompany it. He was almost certainly powerless to control the type of ads that appeared on all sides of it., or to prevent them from showing up between paragraphs as well.

It might seem uncharitable to judge anyone’s trustworthiness based on ad placement, or to even blame it on the underlying web design. After all, today’s internet is absolutely lousy with ads, and the same distractions we encountered on that tech-oriented site are equally present on the websites of major news outlets. The problem for the former, though, is that newspapers and media networks already have a high degree of trustworthiness and name-recognition built in, and can afford to lose some consumer goodwill through those intrusive elements.

The same cannot be said for minor outlets and trade publications, whose long-term viability may actually be more reliant on advertising, but who must necessarily be more careful with web design and user experience in order to convince new readers that it’s worth returning again and again. These two facts are obviously at cross-purposes, but minimizing on-site distractions does not necessarily mean shedding advertisements. It just means being more deliberate about which are and are not allowed to run on site, as well as how they are integrated into the web design.

This is one reason why small online publications might benefit from working with local web design firms that also function as digital marketing agencies. Expertise in both of those fields can be highly complementary, and prior relationships with advertisers can help a web design team to flag those whose own designs and practices might clash with the image that a client is trying to project on their own site.

That same expertise can prove useful in a different way when a client sees fit to start running ads of their own. As their web design partners transition to digital marketing services, they will have a head start in identifying third-party sites that potentially share a portion of the client’s audience and have a compatible vision for their brand. And if there’s one thing that makes a site look more trustworthy than a streamlined and user-friendly web design, it’s being part of a network of sites that offer the same.