Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for 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 web presence appear to others? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What prospects 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 visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various 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 experience potential loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues may include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should 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 things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users 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 potential customers but existing customers as well. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics next to well-crafted 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.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 potential customers but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can also 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 editing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to easily change the look and feel of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up losing you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress users that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expanding Your Web Site’s Functionality

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 give customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 the WordPress software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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