Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site could cost you potential buyers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your website:

Site Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can affect a user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues get corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features 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 functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective clients 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that direct users to product pages by inserting eye-popping product pictures beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure 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 website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires rewriting web code.

If you are considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your web visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***