Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your potential customer sees and this could affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch to our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you select will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have a significant impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other orientation features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users 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 clients but also current clients. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which lead to your product pages by inserting great images and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to 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 users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web content publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you completely customize the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and changing any core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded for free, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your potential buyers 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 WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***