Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website could end up losing you potential new customers and cause more problems than you can handle.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the look of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to use your services.

People are now turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively switch on our smart phone and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant 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 influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color schemes you choose will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have a significant impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems are caused by things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current clients. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors 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 statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial 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 web site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily customize the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content and modifying any of the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole 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!

Want 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 inexpensive 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 shopping cart, use coupons, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Web 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 website visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***