Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you prospective new customers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your web site can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your potential customer sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What 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 affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you choose will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems can include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all problems get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social networks, user 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 user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information 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 cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to comment on, 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable 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 such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, 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 impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers as well.

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

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

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the site’s content or changing any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional themes built for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP website publishing software is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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