Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could lose you prospective customers and a lot of money.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customer sees and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, 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, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your site 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF 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 customers but existing customers also. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely customize the look of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or can be bought quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire site 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!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 improve your business business 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.

***

***