Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website could cost you prospective buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch to our smart phone and go browse someone’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do 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 purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your web site:

Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features and 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 products to a cart, use coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where potential buyers suffer most because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients as well. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages by inserting great product pictures next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting 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 like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires extensive code modification.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you immediately change the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing the design on your website such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site 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 transform 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 features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site 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 WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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