Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website can cost you prospective buyers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still turn to our mobile device and go visit someone’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations 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 color palettes to help make sure that the colors you use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, problems may 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 you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your 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 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 site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages with great product pictures with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – 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 web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, 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 risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content and changing the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, 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.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress website management platform is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone 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!

Need 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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