Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you many new customers.

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

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken images with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly through 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 most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

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

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like menus and headers, 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.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress website publishing platform is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures 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 problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress 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 easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins created for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded free of charge, or you can buy relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues 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 other posts we have published on this site.

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