Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built website could end up costing you potential new customers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

We do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the main design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues may include:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective buyers 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. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers too. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages with beautiful images next to well-written product descriptions. This is 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 area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate 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 results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to easily customize the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you business.

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

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website 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 users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or can be bought for a small price, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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