Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you prospective new clients and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, how your website looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, 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, draw attention to links which direct users to product pages with eye-catching product pictures and well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting 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 and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers 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 problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires extensive web code modification.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to completely modify the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought quite cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that does what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins built for WordPress that can be downloaded for free, or are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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