Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still switch to our mobile phone and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer 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 are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features or 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 visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great product pictures and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(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 site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the site’s content or modifying any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress website publishing software is that WordPress provides you with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP website publishing platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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