Are you losing business because of a poorly-built website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

We do it online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may switch to our mobile device and go browse a website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can have an impact effect on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these problems could be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential clients 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers too. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to 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 through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires modifying code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web site management platform on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately customize the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

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

Earlier in this post we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you potential clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or that you can buy relatively inexpensively, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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 offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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