Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-constructed website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

We typically do it online. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospects 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 things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to 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 them to share their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical issues that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful images with well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – 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 your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires a lot of web development.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to completely modify the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any core software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website 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 let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? 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 features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress website management software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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