Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these problems could be related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your web 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 content 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 well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – 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 potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing clients too.

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

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

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we highly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited additional features.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this information 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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