Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your web site can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your potential clients see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your web 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical problems that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers as well. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which point to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get 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 the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you instantly modify the look of your entire site without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design on your website like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page 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 works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides you with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you potential buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, 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 issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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