Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Typical problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations alongside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse 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 most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or modifying any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP 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 on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP web site publishing software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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