Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website could cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse a site before taking the next step.

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

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these problems could be caused by factors such as 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Typical issues that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective buyers 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately change the look and feel of your site without affecting the site’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your website like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

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

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in 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 and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire website 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!

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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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