Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-built website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn on our smart phone and go browse a web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What potential clients 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 factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have a significant impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can create a poor user experience can include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. 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 quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization 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 confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

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

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues 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 quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone 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 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WP platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***