Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-built web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential customer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile device and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

What prospective customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to external things like your web 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your prospective buyers 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting eye-catching images next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires extensive code editing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

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

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your website such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web content management software is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up losing 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 WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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