Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your website looks can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively turn on our mobile phone and go browse a site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, these issues could be related to external factors 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 attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your 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 files 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 site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers too. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-popping product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you money.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your website users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please see our related posts section.

***

***