Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, how your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems may include some following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some 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. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your site 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients as well. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to your product pages by inserting great product images next to well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to comment on, 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 visitors to browse quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, 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 paying clients but also your existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing site with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing web code.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly customize the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier 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 feature that you want to integrate into your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with 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 build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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