Is your website as discreet as your service?
A business that promises confidentiality can undo it with its own website: a photograph that reveals a location, a form that stores enquiries in the wrong place, a client's logo shown without asking. Discreet clients check these things, often before they call.
What a website can give away
Websites collect and publish more than most owners realise. Photographs can carry hidden location data. Contact forms can pass enquiries through third-party services that keep copies. Analytics and advertising tags can follow visitors to other sites. Team pages can list names that clients would rather not see linked to them.
A checklist
- Photographs. Remove location and camera data before publishing, and check backgrounds for addresses, number plates and faces.
- Clients. No names, logos or recognisable homes without written permission. Describe the kind of client instead.
- Forms. Know where enquiries go and who can read them. Collect only what you need to reply.
- Tracking. Ask for consent before any non-essential cookies or tags, and keep them to a minimum.
- Email. Set up the standard protections against spoofing (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), so nobody can easily send mail in your name.
- People. Decide deliberately who is named on the site, and agree it with them.
- Privacy policy. Written in plain language, and true to what the site actually does.
Answer the first questions anyway
Discretion does not mean saying nothing. A good website for a sensitive service explains how the work is done, how clients are protected, what a first conversation looks like and whom to contact, all without naming anyone. Openness about process is what makes silence about clients credible.
Clients who value discretion will test it on your website first. Make sure it passes.
Related project: VEIL, briefing folders, ID cards and website for a close protection company in London.
