Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed website could end up costing you valuable business.

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

We typically do things online. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we still switch to our mobile device and go visit a website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems can include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the more common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting great product pictures alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like features that let users 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate 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.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is 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 statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, 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 risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

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

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site management platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to instantly customize the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress users available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is 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.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your site 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 products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site free of charge, or you can purchase quite inexpensively, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, 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 rich and immediate user experience that will keep people returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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