Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you prospective customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile device and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current clients. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and changing the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design of your website like the color, template elements like menus and headers, 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 to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you need to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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