Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly images can turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some common problems that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support 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 within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages 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 comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires editing web code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to completely change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress web content publishing platform is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or can be purchased quite cheaply, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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