Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you valuable business.
In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.
We do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse a web site before making our next move.
Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?
What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.
Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?
Here are just some key design problems that can affect your website’s results:
Web Site Design Issues
Common design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your site include the following:
- Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
- Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have a significant impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential loss of customers.
Website Functionality Issues
Common functionality problems include:
- Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
- Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.
Poor Web User Experience
Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.
A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….
Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:
- User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients as well. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
- Stimulating Website – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which point to product pages by inserting great graphics next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
- Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage 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 be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
- Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident 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 site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.
(Site design issues)
As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers too.
Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.
If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.
(WordPress can improve your website results!)
We currently provide a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:
Themes – Unique Website Design Features
WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely change the look of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and modifying any underlying software.
There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WordPress Themes)
Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your website like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.
You can learn about themes here:
WordPress – Modular Features
Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features and functionality.
Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you money.
Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you need done.
Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!
Need 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress that you can install on your site and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.
(WordPress Plugins)
You can learn more about WP plugins here:
WordPress – An Immediate User Experience
In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give customers a great user experience.
WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.
As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about 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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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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