Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

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

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your prospects 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’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color schemes you decide on will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed 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 display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which direct customers to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let users comment on, 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to easily modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and modifying any core software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress users available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your website such as color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want to integrate into your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

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

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these potential customers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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