Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can have an impact effect on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built 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 to sharing their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the most common issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), 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 potential customers but also current clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations next to well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users 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 be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make 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 compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately change the look and feel of your site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your site such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and install on your website for free, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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