Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common problems that can cause a bad user experience can include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct users to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations and well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Customizable Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to quickly customize the look of your site without touching the website’s content or changing the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your website like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding 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 WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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