Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this can influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers also. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This is 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 Website – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires modifying web code.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we highly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to instantly modify the look and feel of your website in minutes.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to integrate with your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging 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 beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues 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 click on links to visit our related posts section.

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