Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can lose you many new customers.

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

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively turn to our mobile device and go browse a site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can affect your user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can have a significant impact in the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, complete their orders using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Typical issues that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with professionally-taken graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability 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 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code modification.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily modify the look of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your site like the color, 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 create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your site, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will 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 that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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