Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably switch to our smart device and go browse a site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

What customers 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 things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Common 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 that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can have a significant impact on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be related to external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the more common issues that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability 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 … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires modifying web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your site without affecting the site’s content or modifying the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing the design of your website like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives users powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing 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 issues 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or can be purchased relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow web 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 a highly interactive user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***