Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up losing you prospective buyers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still turn on our smart phone and go visit someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your web visitors 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 web visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is structured can have an impact impact on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where potential buyers suffer most because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients as well. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers stick around 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 content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which lead to your product pages by inserting eye-popping images next to well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of coding.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site like color, elements like menus and headers, 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 to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features and functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you prospective clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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