Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you prospective new clients and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive things matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective clients see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color combinations you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built web 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 frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your site 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. videos), 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 buyers but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that direct visitors to product pages by inserting eye-popping product pictures next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps users want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely customize the look of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site like color, elements like headers and footers, page 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 helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is 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!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or you can purchase quite inexpensively and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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