Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch to our smart phone and go visit someone’s website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you select will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common problems that can cause a bad user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current clients. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great images with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, 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 success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing website with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content and modifying any core software functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management software is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you want integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

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

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will not return and 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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