Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you potential new clients and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your website looks is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Website Design Issues

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

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues may include some following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors 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 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 organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients also. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting great product images with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors 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 navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected 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 pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead 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 risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you completely change the look and feel of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features and 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 lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP 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 transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WP plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your web visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues 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 website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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