Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can end up costing you potential buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where appearances matter, the way your website looks can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

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

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful orientation features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to things 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 problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a poor user experience can include some or all of the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must 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 without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages with great graphics next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of coding.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page 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.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated into your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your website at no cost, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business 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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