Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed web site could cost you potential customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

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

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers too. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability 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 navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly change the look and feel of your site without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design on your website such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is 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 WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web content publishing platform is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide your site visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

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 using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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