Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-designed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, how your website looks is becoming more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customers see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can have an impact impact on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to things like 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 get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. 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.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients too. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to leave comments, 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 browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors 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 of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about the benefits and advantages of using 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 Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you immediately change the look of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and modifying the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can purchase relatively inexpensively, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive 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, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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