Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn to our smart device and go browse somebody’s site before deciding what to do next.

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

What prospects 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 web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you select will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s 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 incur significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems could be caused by external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to 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 with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients also. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found will provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching images with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to 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 browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable 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 compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

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

If you are considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately change the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website like color, template elements like headers and footers, 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 works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

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

Need a plugin that will transform 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 goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website free of charge, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

***

***