Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, how your website looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will turn to our mobile phone and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable in any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. 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. forms and documents), make sure that users 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 prospective customers but also existing customers. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which direct visitors to your product pages by inserting great images and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users 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 visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – 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 visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires changing a lot of web code.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress content management software is that WordPress gives site owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you money.

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

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and 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 website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***