Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could cost you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the way your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to approach 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 factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and 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 lose valuable customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, 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 site provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the more common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your site visitors 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers too. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken images alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires modifying code extensively.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of 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 – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily modify the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content and modifying any underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress content management platform is that WordPress gives site owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you need to integrate into your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins built for WordPress site owners that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or you can purchase for a relatively inexpensive price and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide web users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers 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 rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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