Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site could lose you prospective buyers and cause more problems than you can handle.

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

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external factors 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 you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. 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.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Users want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages by inserting beautiful graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC 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 results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you currently have an existing website with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the site’s content and changing any of the core software functionality.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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