Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website could end up costing you prospective customers and a lot of money.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile phone and go browse a web site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

What prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is structured can have an impact impact on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external factors such as your web 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 visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some of the more common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct users to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage 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 … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are 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 use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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 web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of coding.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing any core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your site such as color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you business.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results 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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