Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you potential new customers and cause more problems than you can handle.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go visit someone’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can have an impact impact on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your customers 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate 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 success online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your current clients as well.

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

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

If you are considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately change the look of your website without touching the site’s content or modifying the core software functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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