Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you valuable business.
In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential client sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.
Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will switch to our smart device and go visit someone’s website before taking the next step.
Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?
What prospective customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.
Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?
Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:
Website Design Issues
Typical web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your site include some following:
- Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
- Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
- Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
- Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, 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 lose business opportunities.
Site Functionality Issues
Common website functionality problems can include:
- Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.
Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….
Here are just some common issues that can create a poor user experience:
- User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your prospective 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
- Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
- Compelling Features – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct users to your product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
- Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability to 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
- Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also current customers too.
Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.
If you are in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content publishing platform.
(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)
We plan to provide more articles 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 consider WordPress:
WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features
WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.
There are thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.
(WP Themes)
Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.
Learn about WordPress themes here:
WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability
Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress gives website owners expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”
WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.
Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you prospective customers.
WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.
Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!
Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.
And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.
(WordPress Plugins)
You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:
WordPress – An Engaging User Experience
In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your visitors a great user experience.
WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.
As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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