Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Website Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to external things such as your 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 immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical problems that can cause a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients also. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching images and well-written 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.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting 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 business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 your current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires editing code.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely change the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for site users.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

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 WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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