Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential customers see and this could influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can have a significant impact on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable on any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems may be related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where potential buyers suffer most 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 visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some of the most common problems that can cause a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers too. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing site with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to completely customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content or changing any underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, 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 works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or you can purchase for a reasonable cost, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***