Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your website looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

We do things online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse a site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What potential customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

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

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues may be related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common issues that can cause a poor user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web 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 content 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 website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers also. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that point to product pages with great images with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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 risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you have an existing website with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you instantly change the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing any core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings on your website like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

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

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 lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you 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 goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can 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.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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

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