Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your website is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we still switch to our mobile phone and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems are related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your prospective buyers 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish 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 Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

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

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website 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 visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please see our related posts section.

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