Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably turn on our smart device and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

What your prospects 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’ experience and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can have a significant effect on how 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 business information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable business opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems may be caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can cause a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your visitors 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients also. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages by inserting beautiful product images alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires extensive code modification.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to quickly customize the look and feel of your website without touching the site’s content and modifying any underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your website such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you prospective customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers 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 problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP content publishing platform please see our related posts section.

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