Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective client sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can influence your user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems may include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose 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 Web User Experience

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

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients as well. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users comment on, 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 move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your 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 usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to instantly modify the look of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying any underlying site functionality.

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

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page 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 Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WP web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying 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 issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your website for free, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your website users.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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