Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you potential new clients and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to use your services.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers as well. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages with professionally-taken product images and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – 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 pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more information 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 – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you instantly change the look of your site without affecting the website’s content and changing any of the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like headers and footers, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you money.

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

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several 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, use coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress that you can install on your website for free, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the WordPress website management software please see our related posts section.

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