Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-designed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a potential clients see and this could influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still turn to our smart device and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

Common problems that can create a poor user experience can include some of following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. 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 files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product pictures alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it 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 consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to quickly modify the look of your site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing the design of your website like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional 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-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers 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 using the WP web content management software please see our related posts section.

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