Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will instinctively switch to our mobile device and go visit a website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Some common web design issues that can affect a user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can have a significant impact in the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally 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 will experience significant business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like 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 web site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential buyers 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. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers too. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great images beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to 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 around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that 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 contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected 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 have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your site such as color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives users modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that does what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better website experience.

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

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