Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the way your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can have a significant impact in how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your 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. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers too. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires writing code.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to immediately change the look of your website without touching the website’s content or modifying any core software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

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

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