Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you potential buyers and cause more problems than you can handle.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your web site looks can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our smart phone and go browse someone’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

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 hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

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

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to your product pages with eye-catching product images next to well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users leave comments, 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands 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 website’s design settings like color, template elements like headers and footers, page 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 themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your site free of charge, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential buyers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress content publishing software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***