Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your web site can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective customers see and this could influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may turn to our mobile phone and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Some common design issues that can affect your user’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-built 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 networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can cause a poor user experience can include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients as well. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages with great graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly modify the look of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, template 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 create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that you can buy for a relatively inexpensive price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improving Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

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

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

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