Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built web site can lose you prospective buyers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will switch to our smart phone and go browse someone’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your website’s 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 palettes to help make sure that the palettes you select will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems are related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Some of the more common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors 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. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links that point to product pages by inserting eye-popping images and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able 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 most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web coding.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

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

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site and are freely available, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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