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

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively turn on our smart device and go browse someone’s site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have an impact impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful guiding elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues may include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to 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 things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and 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 hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to 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 visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires writing web code.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

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

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as the color, elements like menus and headers, 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 to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives site owners scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will help you get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Site’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful 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, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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