Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site could cost you prospective buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design is becoming more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other assistive elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are fixed 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 intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), 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 potential buyers but existing customers too. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which direct visitors to product pages by inserting great product images beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability 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 … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires changing a lot of web code.

If you are considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily change the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features or functionality.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site 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!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that you can buy relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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