Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can cost you potential new customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your web site looks can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customer sees and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site.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 your content is structured can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your prospective buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with great graphics beside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting 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 such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we highly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

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

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

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