Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website is very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse a website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the main design problems that can affect your website:

Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the most common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current clients as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which point to product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics with well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident 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 like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, 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 results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing site with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth articles 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 Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately change the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and changing any core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings on your site like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will 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 potential buyers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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