Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color schemes you use will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by things like 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 get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing 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 negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers as well. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links which direct customers to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored 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 pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you easily change the look of your website without touching the website’s content and modifying any core software.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can install on your site for free, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give your website 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 contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***