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

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We do it mostly online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come 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 on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers as well. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-popping images next to well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let users leave comments, 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 users to browse quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected 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 like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to instantly modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the site’s content and modifying any core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you customers.

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

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins built for WordPress that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that you can buy for a relatively small price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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