Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the way your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective clients see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website before deciding what to do next.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific features, 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 visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors 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 files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing customers. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. 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 beautiful product images next to well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also current customers too.

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

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

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more information 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 choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to completely modify the look and feel of your website without touching the site’s content or changing any core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing the design of your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress users that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or that you can purchase relatively inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Expand Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with 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 get better results 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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