Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may turn to our smart phone and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with great graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings 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 prospective paying customers but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we highly suggest that you consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can 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 seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to quickly change the look and feel of your site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is 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 themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP content management software is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can buy for a relatively reasonable cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective buyers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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