Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? A poorly-built website could end up costing you potential customers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your web site looks is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

We do things online. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse somebody’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

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

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s 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 you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on websites 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, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting great images with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very 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 area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly around 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 Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively 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 clients but also current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly change the look of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing the design on your website like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress content publishing software is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can cost you customers.

WordPress 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 does what you need your site to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, 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 functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these prospective customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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