Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the design of your website is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile phone and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Website Design Issues

Common web design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues may be caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can create a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients too. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great images with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, 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 risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, 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 redeveloping an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design of your website like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire 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!

Need 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or can be bought relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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

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