Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you potential new customers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential client sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may switch to our smart phone and go visit a website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can have a significant effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors such as your 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where potential customers suffer the most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current clients. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-popping product pictures alongside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to comment on, 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – 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 prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you currently 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 end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you instantly change the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing any of the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WP content management software is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that you want to add to your website, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give website visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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