Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could cost you potential customers and a lot of money.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you decide on will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Here are just some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting great images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you immediately change the look of your website without affecting the site’s content and modifying any of the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell 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!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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