Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your web 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. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients too. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, 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 website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product images beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let users comment on, 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 visitors to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code modification.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly modify the look and feel of your website without touching the site’s content and modifying the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web content publishing software is that WordPress gives users expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you customers.

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

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***