Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the look of your web site can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Common design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you use will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some common issues that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. 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 as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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 information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers too. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, 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 negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to quickly change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes created for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

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

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WP website management software is that WordPress provides site owners with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use 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, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or can be purchased relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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