Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, how your web site looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential customer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can affect a user’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues can include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to quickly modify the look of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web site publishing software is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact 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 for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these potential buyers will simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

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

***

Disclaimer: This site has no association with WordPress, Automattic, or any WordPress-related products written about on this site. We may derive a financial benefit or affiliate commission from purchases of products and services mentioned on this website. All product images remain the copyright of their respective owners and comply with all license terms and agreements of use to the best of our knowledge.

***

Have you found this article useful? If so, please consider sharing this article with other WordPress users using the social links below.