Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website could lose you prospective new clients and important sales.
In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential client sees and this could affect their decision to use your services.
People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s web site before deciding what to do next.
Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?
How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.
Let’s take a look at some of the key design problems that can affect your site:
Web Site Design Issues
Typical web design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:
- Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
- Layout – How your content is structured can have a significant effect on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other guiding features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers and platforms, you could lose potential customers.
Functionality Problems
Common functionality problems include:
- Persistent Site Errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues could be related to external things like your 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 all problems as soon as possible.
- Feature Limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.
Poor Web User Experience
Typically, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-constructed website 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 on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.
Typical problems that can create a bad user experience can include some or all of the following:
- Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
- Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
- Compelling Features – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that point to product pages with eye-popping product pictures alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let users leave comments, 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 browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
- Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.
As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers, but also current clients as well.
Now…what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web development.
If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.
We plan to share a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:
WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features
WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to completely change the look of your site without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software.
There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.
Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts, and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.
WP Plugins – Modular Features
Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.
Earlier 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.
WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need your site to do.
Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!
Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.
And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.
You can learn more about WP plugins here.
WordPress – A Rich User Experience
In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give web visitors a great user experience.
WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.
As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do 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 consumers 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 web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?
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