Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built website can cost you many new customers.

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

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can have an impact effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other guiding features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities 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 functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing customers. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great product images beside well-written product 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 aspect that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, 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 content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is 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 use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand 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 what needs doing requires a lot of code modification.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely modify the look of your website without affecting the site’s content and changing the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design like color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that can be downloaded for free, or that can be purchased quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web 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 visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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