Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the way your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect a user’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your website’s 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 ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users 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 … You also want users to browse quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 paying clients but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you immediately change the look of your site without affecting the site’s content or modifying the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or can be bought quite cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings on your site like color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want integrated with your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 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 choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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