Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively turn to our mobile device and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes 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 specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful orientation elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective buyers suffer most because of a poorly-constructed site 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, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your site visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company 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 of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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 built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web development.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content and changing the core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or can be purchased relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and easily install on your website for free, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress platform please see our related posts section.

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