Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you prospective customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.
In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.
People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.
Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?
The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.
Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site:
Web Site Design Problems
Typical web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include:
- Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout – How you lay out your pages can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers and platforms, you will lose customers.
Functionality Problems
Typical functionality problems include the following:
- Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Typically, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-designed web site is 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 media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….
Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:
- Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no 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 files.
- Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers too. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good user experience.
- Compelling Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to product pages with eye-popping graphics beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
- Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most 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 your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.
As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers, but also current clients as well.
Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?
First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of coding.
If you are considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.
We currently publish more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:
Themes – Instant Web Design
WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to quickly modify the look of your website in minutes.
There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.
Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.
Learn about WordPress themes here: [LINK TO ARTICLE ON THEMES]
WordPress Plugins – Powerful Functionality
Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives website owners powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”
Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.
Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you potential clients.
WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.
Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!
Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.
And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress users that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.
Learn more about WordPress plugins here: WordPress Plugins
WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience
In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your website users.
WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people returning to your site.
As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or website experience.
Hopefully now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
Has this article helped you? Did we leave something important out? Feel free to comment below or take a moment to share this post with your friends.
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