Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit a site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain old ugly images can turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which direct customers to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken images with well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to completely modify the look and feel of your entire website without touching the site’s content or changing the core software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website 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 goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of 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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