Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this could affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on 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 Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by factors such as your web 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features, then make sure that these 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 easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients too. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success 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 some of current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web content publishing platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

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

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased relatively cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design such as color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

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

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can install on your website at no cost, or that can be bought for a small price and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, this information 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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