Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can end up losing you potential new customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the color schemes you use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers also. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your site 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 interacting 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 compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we highly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you easily change the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and changing the core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress website management platform is that WordPress gives site owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

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

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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