Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-designed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

We typically do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may turn to our mobile device and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure 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 web visitors’ experience and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the color schemes you select will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues can include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Common issues that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers too. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which point to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability 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 move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we highly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

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

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your site like color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate into your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress users that can be downloaded free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively small price and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your prospective clients will 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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