Are you losing business because of a poorly-built website? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed website could lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will switch on our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What your potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect a user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various 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 work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers also. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to product pages with professionally-taken product images with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, 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 risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing the design of your website like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you business.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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