Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you prospective new clients and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your prospects 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 affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact a user’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. 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 information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing customers. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to product pages with beautiful graphics beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to comment on, 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires changing a lot of web code.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone 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!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional 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-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you 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 the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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