Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your website looks can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch to our mobile device and go visit someone’s website before taking the next step.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Design Problems

Some common design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can have a significant effect on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues may include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems could be caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to product pages with eye-popping product pictures and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading 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 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 site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of code modification.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to quickly change the look of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP web content publishing software is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up losing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website like links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or are extremely well priced, 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 Improve Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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