Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-built web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential client sees and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we may turn on our smart phone and go browse a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Some common design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things 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 you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), 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 current clients also. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience 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 staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 potential clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires extensive code modification.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to completely modify the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that does what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site has gone 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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