Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed web site? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you prospective customers and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Common web design issues that can affect a user’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have an impact impact on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. 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 well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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 is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you easily customize the look of your website without affecting the site’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website 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 visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Expand Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you provide visitors with a great user experience.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website 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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