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

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the way your web site looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to external factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, 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 functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Some common problems that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers also. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers 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 and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you easily customize the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content or modifying any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design like color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management software is that WordPress provides you with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can download and install on your website and are freely available, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results 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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