Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your web site can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse someone’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can have an impact effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful guiding elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems can include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), 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 potential buyers but current customers too. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web development.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site publishing platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you prospective customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want to integrate with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that you can buy for a small price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’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 your visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential customers 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 grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***