Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the design of your web site can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

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

How your website looks 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 Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect your user’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the more common issues that can cause a poor user experience can include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your site visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

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

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are 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 your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need to integrate into your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform 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 products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct 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 types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this article 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 please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***