Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your web site looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

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

Website Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues may include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable on any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend 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 products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable 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 compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing the design of your website like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

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

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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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