Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by 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 fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to things 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 are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical issues that can create a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients as well. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which lead to product pages with professionally-taken product pictures next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to comment on, 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 users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you easily modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design like the color, elements like menus and headers, page 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 your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Website 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 your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your potential buyers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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