Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn on our mobile device and go browse a site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How 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 engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems may be related to external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your potential customers 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-catching photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to immediately customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design of your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even alert 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 transform your website 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 online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or you can purchase for a small price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep people returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. 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 offer them 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 WordPress CMS software please see our related posts section.

***

***