Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built website can lose you potential customers and important sales.
In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a potential customers see and this could affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.
People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still turn to our mobile phone and go visit a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.
Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?
What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward and do business with you.
Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?
Here are just some of the key design issues that can affect your web site:
Web Site Design Problems
Common design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception about your site include some following:
- Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
- Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have an impact impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant business losses.
Web Site Functionality Problems
Common website functionality issues include:
- Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities 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 functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Invariably, where prospective buyers suffer most because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.
An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….
Common issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:
- User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients too. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
- Stimulating Web Site – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting beautiful graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
- User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
- Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.
(Website design problems)
As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing clients as well.
Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.
If you are in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.
(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)
We currently provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:
WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features
WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your site with only a few mouse clicks.
There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WordPress Themes)
Most WP themes are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.
You can learn about WP themes here:
WordPress – Modular Features
Another compelling reason to choose the WP content management software is that WordPress provides you with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.
Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you potential customers.
Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need to get things done.
Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!
Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded for free, or that you can buy for a reasonable price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.
(WP Plugins)
You can learn more about WP plugins here:
WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience
In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for site visitors.
WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning again and again.
As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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What began as a blogging tool in 2003 has grown over the past decade to become the most popular self-hosted Content Management System (CMS) platform in the world, used to power millions of websites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
