Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed website could cost you potential buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your web site looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do things online. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

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

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence your user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your 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 tools to make sure that the colors you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems could be caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure 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 want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the most common issues that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your customers 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users 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 visitors to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers 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 policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

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

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely modify the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need to integrate with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing 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 take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

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

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

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