Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could cost you potential new customers and cause more issues than you can handle.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may turn to our mobile device and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

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

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can 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 colors to help ensure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is arranged can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed by various 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 across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), 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 clients but existing customers too. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as allowing them 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute 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 risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires writing web code.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited additional features.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give site visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better website experience.

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 the WordPress software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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