Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can end up losing you many new customers.

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

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn to our smart phone and go browse a web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can influence a user’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, problems could be caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common problems that can create a bad user experience include some of following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files 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 site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients too. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to comment on, 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 users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC 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 results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are 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 WordPress 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 coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your web users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have 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 see other posts we have published on this site.

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