Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential clients see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Problems

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you select will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where potential customers suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

Here are just some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers as well. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to your product pages with beautiful graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly through your site 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we strongly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to completely modify the look of your site without touching the site’s content or changing the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your site such as 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 achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to integrate into your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website 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!

Want a plugin that will turn 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 products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site for free, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich 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 and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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