Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go 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 influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can have a significant impact on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by 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 addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

Typical issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great photos or illustrations and well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them 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 be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often 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 that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed 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 own, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you instantly change the look of your entire website without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website such as the color, elements like headers and footers, 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 WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress provides website owners with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site 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!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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