Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you prospective customers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your web site looks can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the key design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features 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 products to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients 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. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers as well. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting great product images with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users leave comments, 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 site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – 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 web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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 serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you completely modify the look of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you want to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get what you need done.

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

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that you can purchase for a reasonable price and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***