Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your potential client sees and this could influence their decision to purchase.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

What visitors 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 affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems could 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 remain proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients too. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations next to well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires changing a lot of code.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly change the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WP website publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole 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!

Want 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 goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your site visitors a great user experience.

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

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

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 the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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