Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems are related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well 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 clearly-defined sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means aiming for 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 great images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let them\visitors 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings on your website such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, 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 WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives site owners powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you potential customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or that you can buy for a inexpensive cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

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

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

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