Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your website can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site before taking the next step.

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

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a user’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can have a significant effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some common issues that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, 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 that lead to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires changing a lot of web code.

If you are considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to instantly customize the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

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

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional features.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or you can purchase quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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