Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-designed website could end up costing you prospective customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your website is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go browse a site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer 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 is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems may be related to factors such as 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), 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 potential buyers but also current clients. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with professionally-taken images with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like features that let them\visitors 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 potential clients but also your existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires extensive web development.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to instantly change the look of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your site like color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress users that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give your web users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues 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 website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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