Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you prospective customers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential buyers see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious 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 influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Typical design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have an impact effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems may be related to factors such as your 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers also. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as the ability 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires changing a lot of web code.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your website like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WP website management software is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers will 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 that does provide them with a better website.

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

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