Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the look of your website is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your prospective client sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers too. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps visitors want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability to 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 visitors to move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand 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 code writing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

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

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Features

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

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas 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 issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you need integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WP Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress web site publishing platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***