Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-designed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your website looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Issues

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

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting great product pictures and well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to 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 visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires editing web code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web content publishing software is that WordPress provides site owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality

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 create a great user experience for visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress content management platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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