Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your website can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective customer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably turn on our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them 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 influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence your visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is structured can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other guiding features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services 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 shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great 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 ….

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers also. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, 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 web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability to 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 through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy 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 web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and 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 potential customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website 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 own, especially if the work requires a lot of web development.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives website owners modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features or functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will 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 on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhance Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give your web users a great user experience.

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your prospective clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them 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 web site please see our related posts section.

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