Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could cost you potential new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your website is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

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

Site Design Problems

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

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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 information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which direct visitors to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to 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 users to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management 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 of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you completely modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

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

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning for more.

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

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

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