Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other guiding features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients as well. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, 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 users to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often 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 site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web code editing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly change the look of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is 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 WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

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

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up losing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 online 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 notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WP Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

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

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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