Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-constructed website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a potential customer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go browse somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence your user’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you select will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly images can turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these 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 select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with great images beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability 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 visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that 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 to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress website publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you money.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know 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 website 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!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? 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 shopping cart, use discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and install on your website for free, or are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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