Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your website looks is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Some common design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems could be caused by things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features or functionalities, 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably 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 dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can create a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service 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. presentation slides), 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 clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful graphics and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users 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 … You also want users to browse quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to immediately change the look of your site without affecting the site’s content and changing the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP website publishing software is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

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 cost you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress users that you can download and install on your website for free, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Features

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 give your site users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays 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, your prospective customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.

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