Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-constructed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

We mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our mobile device and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Some common design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain features, then make sure that these 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 functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common issues that can cause a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current clients. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with professionally-taken images beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like 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 … You also want users to be able 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 neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires editing web code.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing the design of your website like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives website owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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