Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your web site can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential client sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all problems get corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a poor user experience can include some of following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting beautiful product pictures next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 users to browse quickly within 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 neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead 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 potential paying clients but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing site with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some 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 editing code.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design such as color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives users modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you prospective clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are 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 let you turn 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 products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, this information 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 using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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