Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-designed website can end up losing you prospective buyers and cause more issues than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’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 palettes you choose will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is structured can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems can include some following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to things like your 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 business offers users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your web visitors 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that lead to product pages with professionally-taken images alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps users want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users 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 users to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute 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 customers but also current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires extensive web code editing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you want to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress 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 easily choose and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WP plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your prospective customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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