Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site can cost you potential buyers and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your potential 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 web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

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

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most because of 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 them to share their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients also. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations with well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site 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 staff via a responsive helpdesk, 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 content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly customize the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web content management platform is that WordPress gives users scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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