Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your website can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web 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 venting their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective customers 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. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-catching photos or illustrations next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your prospective clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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