Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before deciding what to do next.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some of the key design problems that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 users to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure 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 to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires modifying code extensively.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing the design on your website such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that you can install on your site for free, or can be purchased quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed website, 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-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers 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 website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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