Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your website can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• 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 color tools to help ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your web 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct users to product pages with great graphics next to well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to 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 users to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires extensive web development.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to instantly modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or modifying any of the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing the design of your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you money.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP platform please see our related posts section.

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