Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-designed web site can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite people 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 are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can impact a user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the colors you select will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have an impact impact in how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with beautiful product pictures with well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – 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 potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content or modifying the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your website and are freely available, or that can be purchased for a reasonable cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. 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 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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