Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website could end up losing you prospective new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your website can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may switch to our mobile phone and go visit a web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can influence your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site.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 – The way you structure your pages can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, 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 incur significant business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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 website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers also. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that lead to product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like 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 users to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make 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 compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

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

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

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

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WP Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***