Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective client sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will typically turn on our smart device and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

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

What potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you choose will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other orientation elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like 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, apply discounts, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great product images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage 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 browse quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires rewriting code.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to completely modify the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content and changing the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing the design on your website such as the color, template 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 create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site is 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!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them 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 WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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