Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your website can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase.

We typically do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly images can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have an impact impact on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers also. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations and well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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 prospective customers but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to quickly change the look of your entire site without touching the website’s content or changing any core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your website like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that you can purchase quite cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will 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 get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***