Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built website can cost you potential new customers and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may switch on our smart phone and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospects 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 web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to 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 business provides visitors specific functionality, 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 customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical issues that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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 files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability 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 navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business 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 and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

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

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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