Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively switch on our smart device and go visit a website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Some common web design issues that can affect your prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

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

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems may be related to external factors 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 business provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Typical problems that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – 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 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. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another aspect that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly customize the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing the design of your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives website owners almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or you can buy relatively cheaply and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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