Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your website is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective clients see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go browse someone’s site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What your prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the main design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color combinations you choose will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can have a significant effect on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users 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 potential buyers but also existing clients. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages by inserting eye-catching images with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to 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 … You also want users to browse quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization 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 interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to immediately customize the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Modular Scalability

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

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you want integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

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

***

***