Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you can imagine.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective clients see and this can affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients too. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability 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 be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to instantly modify the look of your entire website without affecting the site’s content or changing the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

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

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures 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!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that you can download and install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Web 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 visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business 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 get better results online. To learn more about using the WP web content publishing software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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