Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What prospective clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is structured can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed by 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 resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your prospective clients 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 forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings 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 success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing site with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the site’s content or modifying any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use 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 items to a cart, apply coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site and are freely available, or that you can buy relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website 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 website users.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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