Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you prospective buyers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our mobile phone and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

What customers 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 ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you decide on will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which point to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant 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 visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(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 constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires editing web code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your website without affecting the site’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress website publishing platform is that WordPress gives site owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you prospective clients.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great WP plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post 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 or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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