Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will switch to our smart phone and go visit someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only 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 You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Website Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can have an impact impact on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers the most because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your potential clients 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken images alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area 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 staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web development.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content or changing the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded 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 plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***