Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the look of your website is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still switch on our smart device and go browse somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you choose will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can have an impact effect on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues may include some following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, 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 make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, 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 website users. For example, draw attention to links which lead to your product pages by inserting great graphics next to well-written product 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.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate 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 neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively 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 customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

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

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing the design of your site like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to integrate into your site, just install a WP plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow site users 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 very rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making 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 and website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***