Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website could end up costing you prospective new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your web site can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your prospective clients see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go browse a web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors 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 influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. 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. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps customers want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability to 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting 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 like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you completely customize the look of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing the design on your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging 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 web visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and 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 and interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress web site management software please see our related posts section.

***

***