Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could cost you potential buyers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.
In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your web site is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.
People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile phone and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.
Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?
The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.
Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?
Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website:
Web Site Design Issues
Typical web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:
- Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
- Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.
Functionality Problems
Typical website functionality issues include the following:
- Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things such as your web 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 all problems immediately.
- Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Normally, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.
A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.
Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:
- User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
- Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers as well. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with a good user experience.
- Eye-Catching Web Site – Users want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with great product pictures beside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- Interactive Site – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as the ability 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 users to navigate quickly around your site 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 ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your existing clients as well.
Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you have an existing website with design issues that could be affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.
If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.
(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)
We currently publish more in-depth information 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:
WordPress – Inexpensive Web Design
WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to easily modify the look of your website without affecting the site’s content and modifying the core software functionality.
There are literally thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WordPress Themes)
Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing the design of your site such as color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.
Learn about themes here:
Plugins – Modular Functionality
Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides you with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features.
Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you business.
Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.
Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire 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!
Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.
(WP Plugins)
Learn more about plugins here:
WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience
In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for web visitors.
WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.
As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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