Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can cost you prospective customers and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still switch to our smart phone and go browse someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your site visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers too. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also current clients as well.

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

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

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to easily modify the look of your website without touching the website’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing 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 take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning to your site.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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