Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed web site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your website’s 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 color schemes you want to use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by things like 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 you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers as well. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly through 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure 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 like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires writing code.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to easily change the look of your entire website without touching the website’s content and changing any of the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your site such as color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives users modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you potential buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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