Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your potential customer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Site Design Issues

Some common design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can have an impact impact on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems may be caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features or 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 visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common problems that can cause a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages by inserting eye-catching product images with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors 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 users to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to easily customize the look of your site without touching the website’s content and changing any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional themes designed for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website for free, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website 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 see our related posts section.

***

***