Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your website looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile device and go browse a web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant 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 web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these problems are 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 attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where potential buyers suffer the most because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients as well. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting great images next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to navigate quickly around your website and access your information 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 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 your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

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

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

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

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you completely customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website like hyperlinks 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 let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your website and are freely available, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will 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, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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