Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

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

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Common design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect 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 to make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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. 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 organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which lead to your product pages with beautiful product pictures with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate 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 visitors, like 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you immediately change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole 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!

Want a plugin that will 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 users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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