Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could end up losing you potential new customers and valuable business opportunities.

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

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage and do business with you.

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

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have an impact impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems may be caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients also. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that direct customers to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, be aware 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 currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of coding.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress website management platform 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 – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to completely modify the look and feel of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes designed for WordPress users available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, 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, these potential customers will simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 other posts we have published on this site.

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