Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site could end up costing you potential new clients and cause more turmoil than you can imagine.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we still switch on our smart phone and go browse somebody’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes 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• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external 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 you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

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

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages with great product images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?

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

If you are researching the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to completely modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose the WordPress content management platform is that WordPress provides you with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use 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, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 the WordPress content publishing software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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