Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website could lose you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your website looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionalities, 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 easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

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

Typical problems that can create a bad user experience include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. 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. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers also. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages with great product pictures next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users comment on, 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 move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – 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 prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires extensive web code modification.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to quickly change the look and feel of your site without affecting the site’s content or modifying any of the core site functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your website such as color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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 visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can buy relatively inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

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

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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