Having a website for your company can be one of the best ways to reach new customers and keep old ones updated. The ease of spreading messages all at once, offering new products, and fulfilling orders is a boon for your business. But with creating a website, pitfalls emerge. If you have a setup that’s not very intuitive, or difficult to navigate, it’ll be a waste for your visitors. Instead they’ll move on to another site. Losing customers because of this is unnecessary and easily avoidable. Read these three tips to make your site more user friendly now.
Add a Search Bar
Most, if not all, wordpress themes sites come with a search bar on the home page. For those of you who have chosen to develop your website from scratch, make sure you include a search bar. There are many tutorials online that will take you through this step, most leading you to your goal in about six minutes. Having a simple search bar caters to those who cannot easily find what they’re looking for on your site. A few key words and the results will get them what they need. Without the search bar you may have just lost a client because of a few moments of impatience.
Decrease Clutter
A cluttered website not only deters your users from getting around, it also makes you look unprofessional. Extra graphics, constantly changing fonts, and too many ads can all lead to a page that doesn’t work. The risk of having this stuff around is that your page won’t load fast enough (resulting in poor SEO) and makes your website really distracting. Go through your coding or hire someone to do so to take away all of the unnecessary things. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a font that’s different or pictures on your site, it just means that they have to be tasteful and well done.
Present Information Properly
If you need a form formatted a certain way, be upfront with the visitor and display a message for that on the page. If you wait until they’ve entered all of their information and then have a warning pop up, it can lead to a lot of frustration. For example, companies that don’t deliver internationally, should mention it before someone starts filling the form. Make sure your users are well informed at every step of their website journey. It goes a long way in establishing good user experience.
Be Available & Responsive
Some people just aren’t good with computers. You’ll have to accept this and deal with their needs over the phone. It’s always good practice to put your phone number in a few places for them to see. Also, be responsive when people fill in contact forms on your website. That’s just good customer service!