Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a site before deciding what to do next.

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

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can have a significant effect on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues may include the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. 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. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients too. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct users to product pages by inserting eye-catching images with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your information 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 ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC 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 web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth 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:

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to immediately customize the look of your website without affecting the site’s content or changing the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn 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 products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 see our related posts section.

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