Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-built web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your web site looks can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase.

We typically do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may turn on our smart phone and go visit a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to come 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 are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other guiding elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective buyers suffer the most because of a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with beautiful product pictures and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to comment on, 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 through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – 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 potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you have an existing website with design issues that could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web development.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Customizable Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you instantly customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features or new functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are 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 plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

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 for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***