Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a website before taking the next step.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Common web design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the color combinations you choose will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed using 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 fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, these issues could be caused by external factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers also. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to your product pages with beautiful graphics beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another thing that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to instantly customize the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your site like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site 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!

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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will 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 that does offer them a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues 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 website or blog please see our related posts section.

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