Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-constructed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your website can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically turn on our mobile device and go visit somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can affect the way users 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 various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some common problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your 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 website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great graphics alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like 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 … You also want visitors 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.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of coding.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely change the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you want integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire 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!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide website visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, 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 immediate user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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