Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still switch to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

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

Website Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your 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 information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers too. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with eye-catching photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors 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 and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you instantly change the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WP content publishing platform is that WordPress gives users scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features or functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your website visitors with a great user experience.

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

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 user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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