Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed website? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

We mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn on our mobile device and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly graphic elements can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is arranged can have an impact effect on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems are related to things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your site 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers as well. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct visitors to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely modify the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this post 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.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website 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 users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that you can purchase quite inexpensively, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors 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 very rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business with 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 the WordPress web content management platform please see our related posts section.

***

***