Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your prospective buyers 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users 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 customers but existing customers too. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with eye-catching images beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of 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, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to quickly change the look and feel of your entire website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional themes designed for WordPress available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be purchased for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, 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 can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional 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 very rich and immediate user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers 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 problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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