Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have an impact impact in how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors like 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 repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where prospective customers suffer most because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors 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 clients but current clients too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will 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 visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires editing code extensively.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to completely customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing the design on your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell 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 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that can be purchased relatively cheaply and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow website users 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 very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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