Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-designed web site can cost you potential buyers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn on our mobile device and go visit a website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant 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 web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to 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 problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your site 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which direct customers to product pages with great product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps users want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires writing code.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or changing any core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content publishing software is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site 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 goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or that you can purchase quite cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or better user experience.

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 using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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