Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed web site could end up losing you potential buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where looks matter, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit a site before taking the next step.

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

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have a significant impact in the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems could be 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 all issues get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific 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 functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to your product pages with beautiful graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site 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 too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing site with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more posts 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings on your website such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site publishing platform is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will do what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? 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 customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or you can buy for a small price and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making 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 with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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