Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you decide on will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have an impact effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common problems that can create a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with professionally-taken graphics next to well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires rewriting code.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that enable you to completely modify the look of your website without touching the website’s content and modifying the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP content publishing software is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? 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 choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give web users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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