Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your web site can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable on any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to 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 always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

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

Typical problems that can create a disappointing user experience can include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your customers 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers as well. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-catching product images and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages 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 comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires extensive web code modification.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more 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 use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily change the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your website like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features and functionality.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can cost you potential customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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