Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can end up losing you potential buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential buyers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch on our smart phone and go browse a web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospects 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 affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where prospective clients suffer most due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common issues that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your site visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients too. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which direct customers to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps customers want to stick around 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 staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires modifying code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying any underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your website such as color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you prospective customers.

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 does what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t showing 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 take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that can be downloaded at no cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow website users 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 rich and interactive user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

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

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