Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your web site looks can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Some common design issues that can affect your user’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other guiding elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems are related to external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products 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 cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients also. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages 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 confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC 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 success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web site publishing platform is that WordPress provides you with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website 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 built web site can cost you prospective buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, videos not playing, 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 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and easily install on your site and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and 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 them 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 consumers will 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 web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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