Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-built website could end up costing you prospective new customers and cause more issues than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customers see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may turn to our mobile device and go visit a site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What 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 affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues can include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients as well. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which direct visitors to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – 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 web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely modify the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you potential clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use 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 select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that you can buy for a relatively small cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers 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 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 WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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