Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you potential buyers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

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

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Some common design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have an impact impact on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful orientation elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through 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 resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience potential business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems can include some or all of the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

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

Common issues that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal 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 web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great images alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – 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 visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly change the look of your website without affecting the site’s content and modifying any of the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you customers.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

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 rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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