Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the way your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse a site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Web Site Design Problems

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

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different 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• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to external things 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 fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can create a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your site visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors 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 prospective clients but also current customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web development.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and modifying the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

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

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you customers.

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 WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce 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 features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress users that you can install on your site free of charge, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have 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 using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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