Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-designed web site can end up costing you potential new customers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What your prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Design Issues

Typical design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, these issues are related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where potential clients suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers as well. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which direct customers to product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps customers want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to comment on, 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 move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly customize the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to integrate with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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