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

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your web site is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish 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 which lead to product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them to 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires modifying web code.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly modify the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your site like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are 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 turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better website experience.

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

***

***