Are you losing business because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built web site can lose you potential new customers and valuable business opportunities.

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

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit a site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have a significant impact on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other guiding features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which direct users to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are 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 and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to completely change the look of your site without affecting the website’s content or changing any core software.

There are thousands of professional themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business 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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