Are you losing business because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-built website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other guiding features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, problems could be related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful product images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let them\visitors 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to easily modify the look of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers 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 helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features and new functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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