Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does it invite them to draw closer 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 factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues may include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like 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, use discounts, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found will provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with beautiful images beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let users 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 around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires modifying code.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you instantly customize the look of your website in minutes.

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

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your website such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete their purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress users that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***