Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you potential new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your potential buyers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go browse someone’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly images can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues can include some following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, problems could be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete their orders using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where prospective clients suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some of the more common problems that can create a bad user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with great images and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately modify the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing the design of your website like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can purchase relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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