Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your potential clients see and this could affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may turn to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing 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 colors to make sure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems may be related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features, 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users 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 customers but also current clients. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken images alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires extensive web development.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to completely change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you prospective clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell 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 correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site 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 on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WP plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or you can purchase for a relatively reasonable cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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