Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you prospective customers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where looks matter, the way your web site looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn on our smart phone and go visit someone’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to them? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What web visitors 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 visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is structured can have an impact effect on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients too. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that direct customers to your product pages with beautiful graphics and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as 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 browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of code modification.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content and changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your site such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is 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:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that you can install on your website at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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