Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the look of your website can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Some common design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read text can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include some following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to external 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website 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 disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers too. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to product pages with eye-catching graphics next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website 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 most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 clients but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look of your entire site without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website 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 take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that you can install on your site free of charge, or you can purchase for a inexpensive cost and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***