Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential customers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go browse someone’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes 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 colors to help make sure that the palettes you select will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphic elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by 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 across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be related to external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain features, 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 easily select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential customers 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to your product pages with great photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires rewriting web code.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and modifying the core software.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing the design on your website such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited extra features.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that can be purchased relatively cheaply and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, your potential buyers 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 build a better online. To learn more about using the WP software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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