Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed web site? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site can end up costing you potential new clients and cause more issues than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive things matter, how your website looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse someone’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your potential customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence your user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes 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 palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can have an impact effect on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through 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 on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems are fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, 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, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. 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 files 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 site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let users 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 … You also want visitors to browse 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.
• Trustworthy Site – 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 to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of 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:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

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

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

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

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

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

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website users 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 very rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web site publishing platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***