Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your web site can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your potential client sees and this could influence their decision to purchase.

We 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 purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color schemes you select will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact impact on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan 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 products to a cart, apply discounts, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably 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 vent their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with eye-catching graphics next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored 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 like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires writing code.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another great 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 easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or can be purchased for a inexpensive price and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich 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 web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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