Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you potential customers and important sales.
In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.
We typically do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site before making our next move.
Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to them? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?
What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.
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Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?
Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:
Web Site Design Issues
Some of the most common web design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include:
- Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout – The way you structure your pages can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
- Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.
Functionality Issues
Common functionality issues include:
- Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan 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 products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Typically, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.
A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….
Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:
- Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients as well. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good experience.
- Eye-Catching Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages 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 interacting 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 such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.
(Site design issues)
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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current clients too.
Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design issues that could be affecting your business?
First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.
If you are considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.
(WordPress can improve your website results!)
We plan to share more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site publishing platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:
Themes – Flexible Website Design
WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to easily change the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.
There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WP Themes)
Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your site like the color, template 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 create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.
You can learn about WP themes here: WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality
Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress web site publishing software is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”
Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.
Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you money.
WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you want to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.
Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!
Need 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or you can purchase for a small cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.
(WP Plugins)
Learn more about plugins here: WP Plugins – Expanding Your Website’s Features
WordPress – An Interactive User Experience
In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.
WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.
As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these potential customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems 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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