Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can lose you potential new customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this could affect their decision to purchase.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. 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 where to go next?

What your potential clients 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 affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can have an impact effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems may include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems could be related to factors like your web 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web development.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to quickly change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing any core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes designed for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire 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!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your site free of charge, or are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business 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 get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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