Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your web site can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to them? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do 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 things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can influence your visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have an impact effect on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems may include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current clients. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires rewriting web code.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to instantly modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content or modifying the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can cost you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***