Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could cost you potential new clients and cause more problems than you can imagine.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your web site is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customers see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our smart phone and go visit a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Some common design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed 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 networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information 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 well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients as well. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages by inserting beautiful images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to 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 … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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 site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish 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 seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

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

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you need to integrate with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have 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 the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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