Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-designed website could lose you potential new customers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will probably turn to our mobile phone and go visit somebody’s website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What visitors 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 influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to things like your web 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 site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy 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 files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to your product pages by inserting eye-popping images alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly 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 built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to instantly modify the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is 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 turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded for free, or that you can purchase for a reasonable price and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these prospective clients will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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