Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach 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 is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can influence your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need 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 great images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to 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 browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often 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 business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately change the look of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features and new functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use 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 cart, use coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded for free, or that can be bought quite cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for site 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 online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform please see our related posts section.

***

***