Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can end up costing you prospective new clients and cause more issues than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Website Design Issues

Common web design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color schemes you select will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is arranged can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems can include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by 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 you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages with beautiful product pictures and well-written 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 thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them to 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you currently have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look of your website without touching the website’s content and changing the core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated into your site, just install a plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WP Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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 information 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 WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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