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

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the look of your website can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse a site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is laid out can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

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

Common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include some or all of the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers as well. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as allowing them to 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 be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – 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 your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel 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 site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web site publishing platform on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly customize the look and feel of your website without touching the site’s content or modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your website such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

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

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

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole web 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!

Need 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your website for free, or that can be purchased quite cheaply and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extending Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the benefits of using the WordPress software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***