Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the look of your website can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse a site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to others? 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 are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is laid out can have an impact effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. Sometimes, these problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your potential clients 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers as well. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind 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 have, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features and functionality.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you potential customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you want integrated into your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire 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 correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or that you can buy for a inexpensive cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, your potential clients will simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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