Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your website:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color schemes you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have an impact impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems could be related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete their purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer most because of 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 users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients as well. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking 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 beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business 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 of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web development.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to quickly change the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, 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 themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site management software is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing 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 problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide your website users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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