Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you potential customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience potential loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues may be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must 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 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires achieving 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 professionally-taken product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let users 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 … You also want users to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately modify the look of your entire site without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WP content management software is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you prospective customers.

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 WP plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site for free, or are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give web visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or better website experience.

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

***

***