Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed web site could end up losing you potential customers and important sales.

In a world where looks matter, the way your website looks is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web presence appear to online users? 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 website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect a user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems may include the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical problems that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things 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 isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which lead to your product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 users to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively 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 potential customers but also some of current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content and changing any core software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing the design on your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 and easy-to-use 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 select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Extend Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back to your site.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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