Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-constructed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Website Design Issues

Common web design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues could be caused by external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers also. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors 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 policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we highly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website 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 online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website 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 your visitors.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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