Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your website looks can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our smart device and go visit somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your potential customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence a user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have an impact impact on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these issues could be related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services 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 discounts, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably 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 frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great product images alongside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps users want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as the ability to 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 content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 prospective paying customers but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely change the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or changing the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like to integrate into your website, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 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 visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that can be bought for a small price and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web site management platform please see our related posts section.

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