Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still switch to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers 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 files 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 site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires rewriting web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to quickly modify the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing any core software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings on your website such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these 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 get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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