Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed web site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can impact a user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients as well. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful images with well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area 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 staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth articles 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 Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to completely customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your website like color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can install on your website at no cost, or you can purchase for a relatively reasonable cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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