Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-designed web site could cost you potential buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your web site is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn on our mobile device and go browse a web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer 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 are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can affect your prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content 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 site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to instantly change the look of your entire website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress site owners available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up losing you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone 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 let you turn your website 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 goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can download and install on your website for free, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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