Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Some common design problems that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you select will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems may include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the most common issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users 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 prospective buyers but also current customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken images alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps users want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing 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, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires editing web code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily change the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or modifying the underlying software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing the design on your website such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that does what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. 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 offer them a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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