Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can end up losing you prospective buyers and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? 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 just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Some common design problems that can influence your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can have an impact impact on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems can include some following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all problems get corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), 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 prospective buyers but existing customers as well. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which point to product pages with great photos or illustrations alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing 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 help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires editing web code extensively.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design on your site such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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