Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-constructed website can lose you potential new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will typically switch to our mobile device and go browse somebody’s website before taking the next step.

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

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful guiding features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken images and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, 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 users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design like 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 great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 business 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 users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors 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 rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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