Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site could cost you valuable business.

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

We mostly do it online. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you select will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by external factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some 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 not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients also. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages with great product images beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as 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 navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly modify the look and feel of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get things done.

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

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive 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 select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be downloaded for free, or can be purchased quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, 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 them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they 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 build a better online. To learn more about using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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