Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you potential buyers and important sales.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your web site is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential client sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

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

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Poor 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 choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the colors you use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these issues are related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can create a poor user experience can include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your 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 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 web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

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

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to completely customize the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives site owners modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need to integrate with your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone 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 turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website for free, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced 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 your web users.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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