Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can end up costing you potential new clients and important sales.

In a world where attractive things matter, your website’s design is becoming more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful guiding elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that lead to your product pages with great photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress content publishing platform on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to quickly modify the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content or modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP 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 address problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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