Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our mobile device and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Website Design Problems

Some common design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you select will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these 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 remain proactive and that all problems get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services 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 minimal 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 files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers too. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which direct users to product pages by inserting great product pictures and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to 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 navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business 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 contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we highly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information 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 choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes 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 created for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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 please see our related posts section.

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