Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed web site can lose you prospective buyers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively switch on our mobile phone and go browse a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Some common web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site.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 page content can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other guiding elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the most common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your web visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients too. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which point to your product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as 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 visitors to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable 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 business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you easily modify the look of your website without touching the website’s content or changing the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

***

***