Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can cost you prospective new clients and a lot of money.
In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential customer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.
We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch to our mobile phone and go browse a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.
Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?
The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to engage with you.
Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?
Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your website:
Site Design Issues
Common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include:
- Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.
Website Functionality Problems
Typical functionality issues may include:
- Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.
An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.
Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:
- Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
- Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that point to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
- Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.
(Site design problems)
As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current clients as well.
Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing site with design problems that could be affecting your business?
First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.
If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web site management platform.
(WordPress can improve your website results!)
We currently provide a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:
Themes – Unique Web Design Features
WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.
There are literally thousands of professional themes created for WordPress available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
(WP Themes)
Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.
Learn about themes here:
Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features
Another great reason to choose the WP web site publishing platform is that WordPress gives website owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”
Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.
Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you customers.
Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need to get things done.
Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!
Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.
(WP Plugins)
Learn more about plugins here:
WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience
In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for site visitors.
WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back for more.
As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
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