Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-built web site can lose you prospective buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence your visitor’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting great images alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them 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 move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web site publishing platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to easily modify the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing the design on your site such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site like links not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WP 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 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WP Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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