Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably turn on our mobile phone and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your web visitors 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 influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues may include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where potential clients suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. 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. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users 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 users to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content 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 users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires extensive code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to completely customize the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you business.

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 WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is 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 let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins built for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded free of charge, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers 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 provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software please see our related posts section.

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