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

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, how your web site looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is arranged can have an impact effect on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your site visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, 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 content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires editing code extensively.

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 the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as 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 helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that you can purchase for a relatively reasonable cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers 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 problems that can affect your web site 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 other posts we have published on this site.

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