Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you prospective new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse somebody’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Some common design problems that can influence your user’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using 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 colors you decide on will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-designed website 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 disappointment across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – 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 visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information 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 – Customizable Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several 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 items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded for free, or that you can purchase for a reasonable cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors 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 very rich user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have 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 or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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