Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed website? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-constructed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn on our mobile device and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have a significant effect on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be related to external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective buyers suffer most because of a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current clients also. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to product pages with beautiful images and well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps users decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, 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 move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web code modification.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

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

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate into your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Web Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have 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 website please see our related posts section.

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