Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed web site? A poorly-designed website could lose you potential new customers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where first impressions matter, the look of your web site is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential clients see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and 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 potential loss of customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want 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 shopping cart, use discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A poor 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.

Typical issues that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great images alongside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure 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 to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web coding.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to easily modify the look and feel of your entire website without touching the site’s content or modifying the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design like color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress provides you with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

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

Need a plugin that will transform 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 products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great plugins created for WordPress that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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