Are you losing business because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you prospective customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may turn on our smart device and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your 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 affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive 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 colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers as well. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC 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 results online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being 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 developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly customize the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as 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 create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you would like to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WordPress Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, 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 feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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