Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive things matter, the look of your web site can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential customer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Website Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your site 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing customers. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which direct customers to your product pages by inserting great images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact 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 contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web coding.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content or modifying the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited extra features.

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your prospective clients will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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