Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite people to draw closer 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 is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other orientation elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the most common problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers also. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident 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 like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires a lot of web development.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to easily customize the look of your website without touching the site’s content and changing any underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WP website management platform is that WordPress provides website owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing 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 problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep users 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 to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this post 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 using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***