Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed website could cost you potential customers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential customers see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is 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 will incur potential loss of customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your site 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections 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 are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages by inserting great graphics and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users 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 visitors to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to completely customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your website like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features and functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are 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 let you turn your website 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 customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or that you can buy relatively inexpensively, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems 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 website please see our related posts section.

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