Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built web site could lose you potential new customers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your web site is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Website Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by factors like 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 all issues are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations alongside 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.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides you with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert 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 correct these immediately!

Need 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential buyers will 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 website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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