Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can end up costing you prospective new customers and important sales.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse a website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have a significant impact on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations next to well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, 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 … You also want users to move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and 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 paying customers but also existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design issues that could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of coding.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content and changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate 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 visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website 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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