Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential client sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Web Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on a website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems could be caused by external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some common issues that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers as well. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct visitors to product pages with beautiful graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth 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 use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to instantly customize the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your site such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you want to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins built for WordPress that you can install on your website free of charge, or that you can purchase for a inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your prospective customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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