Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you prospective new clients and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is structured can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the most common issues 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 hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients as well. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of coding.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you immediately modify the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WP website management software is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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 losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site is 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 let you turn your website 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 products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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