Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built website could cost you many new customers.

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

We typically do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may switch to our smart phone and go browse a site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can influence a user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can have an impact impact on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems can include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying 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 up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where potential customers suffer most because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers as well. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found will provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with professionally-taken product images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to instantly change the look of your site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited extra features.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.

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

Want a plugin that will turn your site 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 products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you 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 see our related posts section.

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