Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed web site can lose you potential new clients and important sales.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Problems

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

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your 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 information 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 website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected 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 that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a 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 what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to completely change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased for a relatively small price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can download and install on your website at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***