Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built website can cost you potential new clients and cause more problems than you can handle.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential client sees and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can affect your prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your prospective buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users 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 potential clients but existing clients too. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which point to product pages with professionally-taken images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to 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 navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Customizable Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely customize the look and feel of your site without affecting the website’s content and changing the core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features and new functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and easily install on your site free of charge, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

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

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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