Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you prospective new clients and cause more problems than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable on any website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems may be caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific 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 users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links that lead to product pages with eye-catching images with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately modify the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site management platform is that WordPress gives users expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 WordPress 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 items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give site users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online 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 your visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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