Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can cost you prospective new clients and important sales.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our smart device and go browse someone’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What 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 visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business losses.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. 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 content 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 site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web 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 usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly modify the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content or changing any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your potential buyers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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