Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you prospective new customers and important sales.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design problems that can influence your user’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the more common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with beautiful product images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as the ability 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 users to navigate quickly within 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 neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide 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

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to quickly change the look of your entire website without touching the website’s content or modifying the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web 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!

Need a plugin that will transform your website 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 visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, 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 great WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them 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 WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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