Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive things matter, the design of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still switch to our mobile device and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you decide on will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues may be caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some common problems that can create a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers also. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to 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 … You also want users to move quickly within your site and access your information 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 most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress content publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to immediately customize the look of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you customers.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these prospective customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress web site publishing platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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