Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful guiding features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems could be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which direct visitors to product pages with beautiful product pictures beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to immediately customize the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you prospective buyers.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep people returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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