Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, how your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your potential buyer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before making our next move.

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

What 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 influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have a significant impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some of the more common issues that can create a bad user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which point to your product pages with great graphics with well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let users comment on, 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 browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to easily change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content or modifying the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? 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 easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, 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, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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