Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can have an impact impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be related to factors such as 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 attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where potential buyers suffer most because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your visitors 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 files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers also. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely customize the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is 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:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you prospective clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or you can purchase for a relatively small price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to connect, 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 and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress website management software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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