Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-designed website could lose you potential new customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may turn on our mobile device and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is structured can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to things such as your web 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Typical issues that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients also. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code modification.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to immediately modify the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your website like color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site management platform is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, 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 rich user experience that will keep people coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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

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