Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your web site can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit someone’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can affect your prospect’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, 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 with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some common issues 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 locate. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors 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 prospective customers but current customers also. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer 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 website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively 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 prospective clients but also current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to quickly customize the look of your website without affecting the site’s content or changing any underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

Learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your site for free, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich 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 site users.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your potential customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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