Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you valuable business.
In a world where appearances matter, the design of your website can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential buyer sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.
People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will typically turn to our mobile device and go visit a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.
Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?
The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage with you.
Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?
Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your web site:
Web Site Design Issues
Common design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your site include:
- Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout – How you lay out your content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful guiding elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur loss of customers.
Website Functionality Issues
Common website functionality issues include the following:
- Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
- Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.
Poor Web User Experience
Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.
Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.
Some common problems that can create a bad user experience include the following:
- User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
- Stimulating Website – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
- User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
- Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.
(Web site design problems)
As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your existing customers too.
Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?
First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.
If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.
(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)
We plan to publish a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:
WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features
WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your website with just a few mouse clicks.
There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WP Themes)
Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.
You can learn about WordPress themes here:
Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality
Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.
Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you business.
Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you need your website to do.
Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!
Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.
(WP Plugins)
You can learn more about WP plugins here:
WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience
In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.
WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning to your site.
As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, your prospective customers will simply move on to another business with a better website.
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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