Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive things matter, the design of your web site can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color combinations you choose will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can significantly impact the way visitors 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 vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues can include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business 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 choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your web 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. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers as well. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that direct users to your product pages with eye-popping product pictures and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to leave comments, 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make 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 to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web development.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional themes built for WordPress users 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 web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you 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 on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

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

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