Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile phone and go visit someone’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems may be related to external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, 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 due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages by inserting eye-catching images with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them 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 within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you prospective clients.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 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 customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or that can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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