Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up costing you prospective customers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Some common design problems that can impact your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, problems could be 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 fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers too. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which point to your product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to instantly customize the look of your website without touching the site’s content and changing the core software.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP 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, enter discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide your website users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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