Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-constructed website can cost you many new customers.
In a world where appearances matter, the design of your website can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.
We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may turn to our smart device and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.
Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?
What your prospective clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.
Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?
Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your site:
Web Design Issues
Common web design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include:
- Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
- Layout – How your page content is arranged can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.
Site Functionality Problems
Typical website functionality problems can include:
- Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems could be 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 always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
- Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.
Poor Web User Experience
Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.
A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….
Common problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include the following:
- Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your potential customers 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
- Compelling Features – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
- Interactive Site – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
- Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors 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 and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.
(Site design issues)
As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients as well.
Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires changing a lot of code.
If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider using the WordPress web site management platform.
(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)
We currently publish more posts about 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 – Flexible Website Design
WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the site’s content and changing any of the core software functionality.
There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.
(WordPress Themes)
Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.
Learn about WordPress themes here:
WordPress – Powerful Expansion
Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”
Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.
Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up losing you money.
WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.
Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business 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 items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.
And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.
(WP Plugins)
Learn more about WordPress plugins here:
WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience
In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.
WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.
As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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What began as a blogging tool in 2003 has grown in less than a decade to become the largest 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.
