Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can cost you potential new clients and valuable business opportunities.
In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.
We do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still turn to our smart phone and go browse a website first before buying products in-store or online.
Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?
What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to engage and do business with you.
Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?
Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:
Site Design Issues
Some of the most common design issues that can influence your visitor’s perception of your website include:
- Color – Bad color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
- Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout – The way your site is arranged can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
- Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.
Site Functionality Problems
Some of the most common website functionality problems include the following:
- Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things such as 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 all problems get fixed as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.
Poor Web User Experience
Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.
A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.
Typical issues that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:
- Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your prospective buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
- Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients also. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
- Eye-Catching Website – Users want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- Interactive Site – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to 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 users to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
- Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.
(Web design problems)
As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers as well.
Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?
First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires modifying code extensively.
If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.
(WordPress can help improve your website results!)
We plan to share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:
Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design
WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately change the look and feel of your entire website with only a few mouse clicks.
There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WP Themes)
Most themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.
You can learn about themes here:
WordPress – Powerful Scalability
Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”
Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.
Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you money.
WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want done.
Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site like links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!
Want a plugin that will let you turn your site 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 goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, 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 great WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.
(WP Plugins)
You can learn more about WP plugins here:
WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience
In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.
WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.
As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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