Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. 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 are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, complete their orders using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad 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 some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients as well. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting great graphics with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – 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 clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires editing code.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to quickly change the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content or modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

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

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

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that you can install on your site for free, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

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

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

***

***