Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can lose you potential new clients and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where first impressions matter, the look of your web site can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your potential customers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we may turn on our smart phone and go browse a web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your site’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 colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a poor user experience include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers also. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This is 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 area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute 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 your current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately modify the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional features.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site has gone 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!

Want 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress that you can install on your website and are freely available, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your potential clients will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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