Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could lose you potential new clients and cause more problems than you can imagine.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your web site looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We do it online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still turn on our smart device and go browse someone’s website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your business. It’s important 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 such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical issues that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients too. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on sites 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 web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to product pages with great photos or illustrations with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires editing code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately customize the look of your entire website without touching the website’s content and modifying any core software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing the design on your website like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need to integrate into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress 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 select and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these prospective customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software please see our related posts section.

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