Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-constructed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective customers see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

We typically do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will instinctively switch to our smart phone and go browse somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your website:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other orientation elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems could be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Some of the more common issues that can lead to a bad user experience can include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. 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 information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients too. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting beautiful images and well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires modifying code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings of your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP website management software is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web 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 let you turn 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 products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can purchase for a relatively small cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s 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 create a great user experience for site users.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, 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 user experience that will keep people coming back 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 rewarding user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems 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 our related posts section.

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