Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site could cost you valuable business.

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

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering 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 how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), 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 buyers but also current clients. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your site 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 confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web development.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will 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 products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins designed for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with 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 using WordPress please see our related posts section.

***

***