In this article we’ll show you the simplest and most inexpensive way to fix issues with your website design.
Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.
In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your web site is very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor see and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.
We mostly do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a website before taking the next step.
Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?
The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.
Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your web site:
Web Site Design Issues
Typical design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your site include:
- Colour – Poor colour combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background colours. There are tools that can help you select web colours correctly and even safe web colour tools to ensure that the colours you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
- Layout – How your site is structured can have a significant impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links and other useful objects.
- Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers and platforms, you will incur significant loss of customers.
Website Functionality Issues
Common website functionality problems include:
- Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important, therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get corrected as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.
A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.
Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:
- Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors 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. Presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
- Stimulating Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages with eye-popping images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like features that let users 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
- Compliance – 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 clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business, information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.
As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers, but also existing clients as well.
Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing website with design problems that are affecting your business?
First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.
If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.
We currently publish more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:
WordPress – Unique Website Design Features
WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily modify the look of your entire website in minutes.
There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.
Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site like colour, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.
WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability
Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.
Earlier in this post we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you customers.
Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want your site to do.
Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your website, such as links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … There are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!
Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.
WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience
In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide website users with a great user experience.
WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back for more.
As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.
Hopefully now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP website publishing platform, please see our related posts section.
Have we helped you become a more productive WordPress user? Feel free to comment below or take a moment to share this information with your friends.
WordPress is huge and can sometimes be overwhelming about where to start. As you move on to the next Page, you will have a clearer picture of where to start and progress to building a professional WordPress Site.
Disclaimer: This site is not associated with WordPress or any of the WordPress products written about on this site. We may derive a financial benefit from sales of products advertised, reviewed or linked to from this site. The product details used in this review have been supplied from the plugin’s website and/or from sites that provide Premium WordPress Services
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