Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site could end up losing you prospective new clients and important sales.

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

We typically mostly do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still switch to our smart device and go visit somebody’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

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

What your visitors 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 things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you decide on will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have an impact effect on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally 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 lose valuable customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities 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 features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product 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 no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which lead to your product pages with professionally-taken images beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often neglected 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 you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website 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 end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires extensive code modification.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you easily customize the look and feel of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your site users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional 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 rich user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

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

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

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