Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can cost you prospective buyers and important sales.

In a world where looks matter, how your web site looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can affect the way users navigate around 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 – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay 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 the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Some of the more common issues that can create a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with beautiful graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your site 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 users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, 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 results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we strongly recommend that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to completely change the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

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

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose the WP website management platform is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you potential customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective buyers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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